Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 29

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (idea lab). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Alternate Community Amendment Thoughts

Per some views developing that the current community amendment on ARBCOM's ability to delete pages, both leaves it unclear whether ARBCOM possesses deletion power at all and doesn't fully prevent future devolvement issues, I'm looking for views on a possible variant:

The first paragraph of the "Policy and precedent" section of the arbitration policy is amended to add the following underlined text:

The arbitration process is not a vehicle for creating new policy by fiat. The Committee's decisions may interpret existing policy and guidelines, recognise and call attention to standards of user conduct, or create procedures through which policy and guidelines may be enforced. The Committee does not rule on content, but may propose means by which community resolution of a content dispute can be facilitated. The Committee may delete, undelete, blank, redirect and move pages for non-content reasons. This authority is only to be used either when the community could not consider certain evidence or has demonstrated an inability to resolve it. The Committee may not devolve this power, and is limited to their use during standard procedures, or by motion where off-wiki discussion is necessary.

• 1 possible thought comes to mind of whether we allow them to devolve undeletion to DRV (or its equivalent body, if it changes) - obviously this couldn't work for off-wiki evidence cases, but could be appropriate for other instances? Nosebagbear (talk) 10:12, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

• Additionally, as it's not entirely clear whether ARBCOM has this power to start with, the passing of the ongoing amendment and any failure of this one wouldn't indicate either way that ARBCOM does/doesn't already have this power (in its own right). Nosebagbear (talk) 10:14, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Thoughts, issues, etc

• I like it, the wording is better than my draft.  :) EdChem (talk) 10:40, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Cheers, I'm also pinging @Galobtter and Cunard: given the former's consideration of wording and the latter's obvious knowledge and practice crafting such. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:50, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

• I think this raises the "hard cases make bad law" issue again. I can't speak for the other arbs, but it never occurred to me that we could authorise deletion apart from in very limited circumstances involving abusive private information (basically as a variant of oversight, which we all hold). Because we don't do content. Has it ever come up apart from the recent hullabaloo over User:Dlthewave/Whitewashing of firearms articles? – Joe (talk) 17:05, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

@Joe Roe: - People have mentioned possible other instances but it's the only clearcut DS deletion I've seen. I think it was somewhat the inability of ARBCOM to find consensus on the issue that meant people were concerned what might happen in the future (in effect, if you ruled it a legitimate DS action, "lots" of individual admins might do it, with only AE to combat it (which is quite tricky to overturn things in). I've somewhat written this with it in mind that "experienced editors generally trust ARBCOM. BUT they are both nervous about being on the wrong side of DS and many think it's morally/ethically/philosophically/effectively (take your pick) dubious as an entire concept - at best a necessary evil." Nosebagbear (talk) 17:33, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Joe Roe, the fact that ArbCom failed to reach consensus on the limits of its authority on deletions made some clarification desirable. The fact that it then proceeded to ensure that a deletion with claimed DS protection could not be reversed at DRV – despite knowing that DRV had already concluded that the deletion should be reversed – made a clarification necessary. The fact that some Arbs commented at AE that there was no reason to overturn because the decision might be wrong but was within discretion, and that a former Arb then closed the AE endorsing and re-imposing the deletion despite it having neither policy nor consensus support, and in the face of the DRV, because there was not a substantial majority of administrators (because non-administrators are worthless / irrelevant according to the prevailing AE culture, about which ArbCom does nothing) who saw it as invalid, and despite the lack of ArbCom authority to delete such materials nor to delegate deletions outside the deletion policy as valid DS actions, collectively made a modification of ARBPOL necessary and urgent. The mess about resysops, another area where ARBPOL gives ArbCom no authority, proves that ArbCom ignoring its limits of authority is a trend and not simply a one-off. These proposals are entirely the product of ArbCom overreach and were totally avoidable if ArbCom had simply said "ArbCom authority over deletions is unclear and in any case would only be used in rare and unusual circumstances (like the privacy issues Rob has raised). We recognise that GoldenRing and Bishonen acted in good faith, and wish to clarify that it is our view that DS / AE should not be used for deletions, and any deletions that may be needed should be undertaken in line with the existing deletion policy and be subject to standard review. Deletions that may need consideration that would not be supported by the deletion policy may be raised directly with the Committee at ARCA or by email if privacy considerations require." Instead, having side-stepped the authority / policy question, ArbCom modified procedures (beyond the community ability to edit) to entrench any claim of AE protection as beyond community review without jumping through hoops. Simply to hold a DRV, a significant majority consensus is needed at AE or AN (where non-admins can't see the page in question anyway), in either case subject to further appeal to ARCA. Both AE and ARCA can reject an appeal without considering the merits of the deletion by focusing on admin discretion. All of this was done unanimously (IIRC) by a Committee that can't even agree it has authority over deletion... and you are surprised there is push back? ArbCom needs to learn that its authority has limits and if it won't respect them, the community can act to codify and restrict those limits. EdChem (talk) 02:04, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

If you're worried about a possible future where admins start going around deleting willy-nilly despite clear statements from ArbCom at the ARCA that we would highly frown upon any deletions in mainspace, the fact that the community can review such deletions at AN under existing procedure and overturn them, and the reality that any such action would drag such a hypothetical admin through a couple months of discussions on the topic, doesn't it at least make sense to wait for that to actually happen before amending ARBPOL? ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 08:18, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

I think I'd usually classify changing a policy due to a single incident as WP:CREEPy behavior. There should be at least two clear-cut incidents that weren't easily resolved before anyone should try to write down the One True™ Answer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:53, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Wizard that suggests article/image pairs (using Wikidata images)

Many English Wikipedia articles have no illustration despite the Wikidata item having a picture. Why? Because many non-English speakers set Wikidata pictures using tools like HarvestTemplates, WDFIST, or the Commons Android app's Nearby items map.

It would be great if the English Wikipedia could benefit from all of these pictures.

How about a tool that would:

1. Suggest me one article and one picture, showing:
   • The rendered article
   • The image
   • The image's English caption and English description
2. Let me either skip, or edit the article to add the image. It could even suggest me some wikitext.
3. Automatically go back to step 1 with another article/image.

The Arabic Wikipedia and some others automatically transclude images from Wikidata, the wizard I describe above is a more conservative approach, but still better than doing nothing and letting all of these great images unused.

If anyone implement this please let me know, I will be your most dedicated user :-) Syced (talk) 10:02, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Some templates using Wikidata already fetch images from WD, like {{Infobox person/Wikidata}}. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:40, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Great! I see in that template's documentation that Wikidata fetching is "opt-in", though, which means that all templates ignore Wikidata except when someone has taken the time to go check Wikidata and manually edit the article to switch on the "fetchwikidata" parameter. So, the tool I described above could switch on fetchwikidata if the article uses such a Wikidata-compatible template. :-) Syced (talk) 02:33, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Is it a good idea to allow non-admin closure?

I realize that some people who created an article don't have a whole lot of Wikipedia experience and don't understand why the article they created should be deleted. I think a lot of them if they know about non-admin closure, then they would close the discussion about their article as keep that way because that is allowed unlike just removing the AfD template. Maybe some of them would just do it in the wrong situation when it actually was worthy of deletion and not understand and think there was nothing wrong with what they were doing. Blackbombchu (talk) 18:08, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Admins, as editors, do not have special rights over any other editor on any issue, which includes the ability to assess consensus and give summaries of discussions. Admins have special tools (like the ability to block users or the ability to protect articles) that other editors don't have, but those tools do not give them any additional authority over things like assessing consensus and writing summary statements. Any editor in good standing with sufficient experience at Wikipedia can do that. As a practical matter, discussions that require an admin to use their tools (for example, a discussion that shows a consensus to block some user) should be left to an admin to close, if only because an admin is needed to block the user anyways, but for any discussion that doesn't directly and immediately require one of the admin tools, any uninvolved editor in good standing and sufficiently experienced can summarize the results. --Jayron32 18:15, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

In addition to what Jayron32 said, this is a situation in which you need to actually point to a case of its happening before it's actually considered a problem. Eman235/talk 19:14, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

I'd take that one step further. You'd need to show an instance where this has happened and it has caused a problem. There are several very experienced editors who routinely patrol AfD. I'd guess this probably has happened, but I'm much more certain that if it did (or does) happen, it would be promptly reverted. This strikes me as a solution in search of a problem. John from Idegon (talk) 19:23, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

• Misunderstood the initial complaint - yes, I've never spotted this happen. Yes this would require at least the nominator, plus any other deleter, not to pay attention to the close. Any self-close is an automatic bad-close, and would be taken poorly. Nosebagbear (talk) 08:28, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
• Such a closure would be an involved close, which is not allowed. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 16:14, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
  • Well, it is done. We tend to call such instances "withdrawn" rather than "closed as keep by the nominator", but it's the same effect. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:05, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
• I don't think non-admin closures or relists at AfD are a good thing and there was some support for this concept (especially the relist part) in a semi-recent discussion over at WT:NAC. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:06, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

That's a fairly significant extension from the raised point in this discussion. In fact the discussion at NAC I considered fairly insulting to cut such a wide remit from NACs, as it implied all relists I'd made were incorrect and unwarranted. Your statement is actually beyond that and indicates my closes lack value (or that the total value of all NACs is insufficient to consider alternate resolutions). You could combat NOQUORUM by prohibiting NA-relists when only the nominator has participated or filter out non-admin closers with insufficient policy knowledge by tying it to a user-script permission in the same way as AfC reviewers are. Nosebagbear (talk) 21:07, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Idea - bot to tag orphans

Before filing a BRFA, or even opening an RfC, I'd like to get some feedback about a bot to conduct a one-time run to tag orphans.

This would be similar to the RfC on a onetime run for tagging unreferenced pages

Currently, I count 27215 pages that are

• Have no incoming links from mainspace
• Are not disambiguation pages
• Are not categorized as set indexes, given names, surnames, orphans, soft redirects to wikitionary, redirects currently at RfD, or candidates for undeletion
• Are not redirects
• Are in mainspace

To be clear, these have absolutely no incoming links from mainspace - a link from a disambiguation page, though not enough to meet the orphan criteria, keep the page out of the list

What would users think of a bot to automatically tag these 27k pages? If you have any suggestions for other categories to exclude, let me know. Thoughts?

Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 04:03, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

This can only be helpful, as far as I can reckon. But you're missing the other subcats of Category:Wikipedia interwiki soft redirects. Eman235/talk 21:57, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Eman235: Thanks, I'll run the query again with "Redirects_to_%" to filter those out to, but it won't have much of a difference. --DannyS712 (talk) 21:59, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Eman235: With an updated query, I count 27289 untagged orphans - the number fluctuates, obviously. Thanks for the tip --DannyS712 (talk) 23:43, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

• Unlike unrefed, there is nothing "wrong" with these pages per se, if people want to just work adopting orphans, can't they just use Special:LonelyPages already? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:02, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

  And yet, we currently tag orphans - there are over 110,000 pages in Category:All orphaned articles - the same argument against tagging these articles extends to tagging those - if we are going to be tagging orphans at all, we should tag these 27k untagged orphans --DannyS712 (talk) 16:30, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

• AWB as part of its general fixes tags orphans. It may be a good idea to review the AWB source to see what criteria it uses to select an orphaned page. --Izno (talk) 17:04, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

  @Izno: by default it only tags pages with 0 incoming links --DannyS712 (talk) 17:55, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

  DannyS712, "We're doing something apparently pointless, so I'd like to do it on a massive scale" sounds like the opposite of a good idea. We're already hiding these templates on most articles. Maybe AWB should stop tagging them. A potentially useful thing to do would be generating lists for individuals or groups that are interested in Wikipedia:Building the web to these articles. If you do proceed, then I'd suggest that you only tag articles that are not about people or businesses. Because of the quirks of our notability guidelines, we end of with a lot of these articles, and it's very difficult to create legitimate links to most of them, unless you want to create a bunch of unencyclopedic navboxes for things like "Plastic surgeons in Alaska" or spam article with sentences like "Some plastic surgeons, such as Alice and Bob, are in Alaska." WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:56, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

  What she said. The whole notion of "orphans" is a remnant of the early days of Wikipedia, when "Build the Web" was the vogue and there was a general feeling that it was necessary there be a path for readers to find every Wikipedia page from elsewhere on Wikipedia. Now that the main route to each page is from search engines, the entire concept is obsolete; if anything we should be deprecating the existing {{orphan}} tags, not massively spamming thousands more. ‑ Iridescent 17:36, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

  In that case, what would the community think of TfD'ing the orphan template? DannyS712 (talk) 17:49, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

  Not a bad idea. Especially if the functionality can be replaced by a query. –xeno^talk 17:55, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

  Just to put this in scope, we currently have 116042 pages that are tagged as orphans, and a further 27k that aren't but meet the criteria. I'm neutral about whether we should deprecate the tag or not, but here are the numbers. --DannyS712 (talk) 18:49, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

• What Iridescent said, and deprecate the tpl. With the huge advances in both Google's and Wikipedia's search engines, the reason for interlinking (except of course for outgoing Wikilinks) Wikipedia articles is now practically obsolete.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:26, 12 May 2019 (UTC)
  • Back in the day, links were the only way to reach articles. Special:Search didn't exist in Wikipedia's early days. I think a gentle "deprecation" (stop adding it, especially automatically) should come first, and consider removals only later (like, a couple of years from now). The obvious baby step to take is to tell editors to only add the tag, if, in their best judgment, they believe that a non-spammy, non-navbox link could be made. We can backstop that with a rule that if there's no sensible |reason= given, then any editor who attempts to de-orphan the link can remove the template. In terms of the procedure, should we take the template to TFD, or have an RFC on the template's talk page about updating the "rules"? What do you all think? Izno, are you available to figure out how AWB's role? It looks like it's in Twinkle (better to remove, than to try to control, or just leave it?), too. Kudpung, do the various page-curation tools add this tag? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:02, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, the curation tool can tag for orphans. However, the new page reviewer right does not prevent other users from applying maintenance tags using Twinkle. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:28, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

• • • If someone is going to go to the trouble of thinking of a reason they should just de-orphan it, no? So I think yes, deprecating from use is a good first step. –xeno^talk 18:13, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
      • I can see very occasional circumstances where the reason= field might be valid—namely, where there's an obvious topic that will contain links to the article, but that article hasn't been written (e.g. when we have an article on a notable product but not the manufacturer), and consequently it will be de-orphanable in theory but would take some effort to do. These would be so few and far between, I wouldn't think it would be worth the effort as it would just confuse people. Regarding AWB, remember that's a product used by hundreds of wikis, including sites outside the WMF family, so we need to be careful about changing its code; on something like a Wikia fansite, I can entirely see how orphans and walled gardens would be an issue. My inclination would be to keep the template for the moment but deprecate all its output—so no maintenance tags and no adding to any category—and see if anyone even notices, let alone comes up with a valid complaint. That way, we can just roll back the template if it turns out there was a hidden pool of people who find the tag useful, rather than having to remove 100,000 tags only to need to re-add them later. ‑ Iridescent 20:01, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
        BTW, @user:WhatamIdoing, if you want to ping a bunch of people to a post without actually including their names the {{bcc}} template is a lot more elegant than linking words to usernames. ‑ Iridescent 20:01, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
        • The template currently hides itself after some period (1-2 months) after some fairly-recent RFC. It still emits the category even after that date, which seems reasonable. --Izno (talk) 20:14, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
• Any broader discussions should also involve Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage. I agree with the general trend of the thread so far: in most cases there's no need to tag orphans, and if there are automatic tools that add such tags, then should stop doing that. – Uanfala (talk) 13:29, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Re-enabling downloadability of Books / Collections

Hi,

A Wikipedia Book is a collection of Wikipedia articles.

In former days there used to be a rendering service on Wikipedia that created PDFs from Wikipedia Books. This service has been decommissioned. As detailed in the following post summarizing the discussion a replacement is not expectable in the near future.

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Uxkv0ib36m3i8vol&topic_showPostId=uxsjbpkqfmgq1jyx#flow-post-uxsjbpkqfmgq1jyx

So I propose that I render a PDF for each Wikipedia Book in my home and upload them to Wikipedia. This way the PDFs are available to the users again.

I am going to use the following software to create the PDFs:

http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/

Since I need to buy hardware, do a considerable amount of setup and let it run for a few months, I need to prepare this operation well.

I am only going to do community maintained books.

I am happy to hear about your thoughts regarding this idea.

I know it is a bit unusual for a private person to follow such an approach, but currently I can not think of anything else I could do in order to re-enable PDF downloads for collections.

Yours Dirk Hünniger (talk) 14:00, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Interesting—it would be kind of like the spoken Wikipedia files in that they could get out of date. Unless you made a bot that updated them periodically. Eman235/talk 18:59, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Exactly. Regular updates are planned. But I expect something between a few month and one year of lag between the PDFs and the current wiki. Dirk Hünniger (talk) 19:19, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

So, I started a minimal setup now, 5 years old dual core laptop next to my fridge, with one process at a time. The first three resulting pdfs are available here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17g5Ey6jauKd3CLMDNBOnV3RYKcJN0QZu?usp=sharing . I need about 1 hour per pdf and each has got a size of 20 MByte on average. Since I got roughly 6000 pdf to make. This will take about 250 days an use about 120 GByte of disk space. Dirk Hünniger (talk) 13:01, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

I stopped my toy experiment. I processed 23 books, got 20 results (13% failure rate). It took 54 hours, 2.5 hours per book, 625 days for all books. Size 45 MByte per book on average. So 300 GByte needed for all books. The results are available https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17g5Ey6jauKd3CLMDNBOnV3RYKcJN0QZu?usp=sharing . So I would have to pay 400 EUR for cloud fees to generate that, something I could afford. Dirk Hünniger (talk) 21:14, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Google Doodles

Is there some way that we could learn about Google Doodles before the day on which they will occur in order to improve the articles? StudiesWorld (talk) 13:45, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

You know they differ depending on your location and there's not some standard global calendar they follow, right? I can't imagine they would ever agree to it; giving pre-notification of what they plan to run would mean Google opening the floodgates for every spammer and SEO-merchant to crapflood them. ‑ Iridescent 13:56, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

Alternately, perhaps Google would consider improving the articles themselves while creating the Doodles? A lot of their value is in visitors' ability to discover context by clicking through to a free article explaining the subject. – Teratix ₵ 14:20, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

@Teratix: - that wouldn't work either. They'd be paid editors that people would eventually catch on edited the doodles pre-emptively. Or they'd need to create a bunch of one-time accounts...which is also not something we'd want to encourage in paid editors Nosebagbear (talk) 18:08, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't see anything inherently wrong in creating many one-time accounts for this purpose, as long as they declared their paid status and connection. They would be benevolent paid editors, not harmful. Alternatively, if we want to restrict them to one account but avoid giving the game away early, Google could prepare an updated version of the article but only post it once a Doodle was live. Of course, this is assuming Google wants to take the time to do this, which may be doubtful. Still, it's worth asking the question. – Teratix ₵ 18:28, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

​@Nosebagbear: I think it could actually make sense, even if people would catch on the day before, because we still wouldn't know what the Doodles would look like, and part of the interest in them is because they're sometimes interactive or otherwise interesting in some way not derived from their being labelled Google Doodles. It also wouldn't be especially surprising if, for example, they were to improve Saint Patrick's Day and related articles every March. It would also serve as a way for Google to "give back" other than sending the WMF piles of cash. Jc86035 (talk) 11:01, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

• Unless one actually worked for Google, how would one know what the Google doodles were the day before they occurred? Vorbee (talk) 17:22, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

• @Vorbee, as I read it the proposal is that we pay (or encourage) Google themselves to write articles on the relevant topics before the Doodles run. Needless to say, if we actually did catch Google trying to influence our content that directly, we'd block the accounts on sight. ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Whilst a Google Doodle briefly increases traffic to a Wikipedia subject page, I dislike a subject page being edited to state something like "on such and such date this person/thing was honored by a Google Doodle". For example, as I'm writing, the Google Doodle is on Elena Cornaro Piscopia, and on her page under "Legacy" it says "On 5 June, 2019, Google celebrated her 373rd birthday with a Google Doodle.", so what. Likewise, for Ada Lovelace under "In popular culture" it states "In 2017, a Google Doodle honored her on International Women's Day." It adds no value to any article. For me, these entries are just spam. It isn't notable that, for a short period, a search engine briefly acknowledges a person or subject, therefore it should not be in a subject's Wikipedia page. This topic has been mentioned before, see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_119#Welcome_or_reject_mention_of_Google_doodles_throughout_the_encyclopaedia?, and the few comments generally agree with my view. I would like to see a policy where adding an entry to a subject stating that it was briefly mentioned as a Google Doodle be disallowed, and when we come across such a mention it can be removed.GR8DAN (talk) 12:38, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I note that Wikidata has a property for recording Google Doodles. (See https://w.wiki/4eg for examples.) Perhaps we should divert the efforts of google-doodle-recorders over there. This gives us the option to display Google Doodle links automatically in infoboxes or whatever, depending on local policy. Bovlb (talk) 17:45, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

AWB-alternatives for Linux

Is there any alternative of AWB for linux? Now AWB can run through Wine. But it may not support in all systems. Other AWB-like softwares such as PyAWB, JWB, etc are not working currently (correctly). It is better that creating a linux/mac supporting versions for AWB like huggle 3, huggle version which is compatible for linux also. It will help Linux/Mac using Wikipedians for using AWB more efficiently. Thank you.--PATH SLOPU 03:07, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

AWB is a pretty complex piece of software bundling a lot of functionality. Is there a particular feature or set of feature(s) you were interested in? -FASTILY 04:17, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

@Fastily:I interested it's features such as doing repetitive edits in in a set of pages. For example adding a particular text, template, etc in several articles. Creating a set of new articles (usually stubs) of on topics such as places, geo-features, etc. Thank you.--PATH SLOPU 07:15, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

At one time I used AWB on Windows with programs in Unix (linux). Basically AWB does all the login authentication and uploading diffs, while the core logic is done under unix via AWB external script function. It can be done with Cygwin, or virtual box. More info User:GreenC/awb/cygwin. AWB runs under windows natively and the bot program runs under Unix natively, best of both worlds. -- GreenC 14:39, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

@GreenC:But this is done in a shared system, isn't it? Regards.--PATH SLOPU 15:54, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

A virtual machine. Linux can be guest and windows as host, or other way around. In my experience there is no performance or other problem with decent CPU and memory. VMs are quite common even at Wikipedia, most hosting providers, Amazon etc.. -- GreenC 16:07, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

BTW so long as the Windows and Linux machine share a common folder such as with network attached storage they don't need to be hosted on the same computer. -- GreenC 16:12, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

@GreenC:Thank you for advice. But it means the users must need a Windows system, mustn't it? Regards.--PATH SLOPU 15:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't think there are any plans at the moment to make a cross-platform AWB. (Incidentally, what issues are you having with JWB? You might want to bring that up here.) But it is freely licensed, so anyone with the ability and initiative could modify (or rewrite, which is what I think happened with Huggle 3) the code to run cross-platform. Eman235/talk 03:29, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

Yet another Main Page redesign proposal

I have created a draft of a Main Page redesign that can be seen here, even though I know redesigns are rarely sucessful. It is by no means meant to be a final design, but maybe it could serve as a starting point for some discussion. There are certainly areas that are up for debate or could be refined. Feel free to give some input, or use as basis for other suggestions. -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 11:21, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Well, I like it—personally I think the small color palette is more consistent with the rest of Wikipedia. It should definitely be reflowable, though (i.e., shrinking the browser window size should switch it to a one-column layout). Also, I think the (for want of a better word) looming puzzle ball looks redundant with the logo being in the sidebar and all. Eman235/talk 12:10, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Reflowable is a good suggestion, that would be good. I also agree somewhat with the logo as background as well, I just felt that the header area looked empty. Maybe some other backround could work? -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 12:44, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

I've added another more generic background. -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 14:34, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Ooh, I like that; it's reminiscent of Monobook. Eman235/talk 19:02, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I like the simple palette and the larger spacing around the text, but I'm not sure it's sufficiently better than the current design to justify the endless discussion and editor hours that would be spent evaluating and implementing the new design. There is a reason there hasn't been a redesign since 2006. – Teratix ₵ 13:46, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I've noticed that it's no easy task... I would however say it might be worth it. - Jsdo1980 (talk) 14:34, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

I think you need a little more margin/padding around the labels - for example the "Today's featured picture" text is abutting/being partially obscured by the image below. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:42, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

In monobook at least. For the same section in minerva, the image so tiny it is hard to see. Try out any workups with all the skins to make sure they work well. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:43, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Good point. Vector has increased the line height. I've tried to fix that. Does it look better now? -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 18:06, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Better, note TFP looks bad in minerva. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:51, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

TFP looks bad in Minerva with the current design as well. I'm using the same template, so I can't change that. -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 13:08, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• Well, I think the header is at least better than what we have now. It looks quite more modern. – Ammarpad (talk) 15:53, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't have any specific suggestions, but wanted to say that I like it better than the current main page. Good work. – Levivich 03:15, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

• @Jsdo1980: If you use TemplateStyles you can do cool stuff like making the content responsive. I think it already looks nice but would agree that it's not yet enough of an improvement to justify replacing the current main page. (Also, it's probably better not to specify Arial specifically, since most of the skins don't use it as the default font. You should probably leave font selection to the website's CSS.) Jc86035 (talk) 10:47, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Jsdo1980, considering that the last attempt at making a change (non-visual) to the main page was reverted because someone with a tiny screen laptop 'suddenly' had 1 column instead of 2 columns, I'd say, be prepared to engage for a long time and to face stiff opposition if you want to make a change. I'm personally pretty done with trying to get anything moving on the main page, the community is just too stuck in their ways. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:24, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

• I really like it. Especially the borderless sections and the headings. It's on a par with the Russian and Spanish main pages which are probably my favourite out of the existing versions (this 2014 proposal is also quite nice). As for subjective aesthetic criticism, the only things I'm not sure about are the gradients in the bordered boxes which are gradual enough that it makes it look a bit like they're just filled with differently coloured rectangles, the right-hand side (the non-book bit) of the main banner's background image which you could argue takes away from the simplicity, and possibly the portals bar, though it's growing on me. I think it's that it looks a bit out of place since there are no other blue bits or fade-out gradients. (Personally, I'd get rid of the portals altogether.) ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 22:52, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
• I think that this new mainpage design looks nice. Personally, it looks a lot better than the current one. This new design is a lot cleaner and simpler. Especially seeing as the current design uses many different colours and is filled with many boxes. I agree with ReconditeRodent that the portal bar is a bit different from everything else. Personally, I would not be opposed to moving these links down the page, however, if the links are going to stay in their current location, I would want them too not stand out as much. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 10:18, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

  @ReconditeRodent and Dreamy Jazz: Thanks! I've made an alternate version where I have removed the gradients and replaced the portal bar with an "information bar" to the right, and moved portal contets to a section at the bottom instead. I've used the subportals or related portals for the old portals. In some cases it becomes a bit weird in my opinion, like for Biography. -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 12:08, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

  Jsdo1980, I like that version even better. I think having links to the Wikipedia introduction, help pages and contact page at the top of the main page will help to make the main page more accessible for new users.

  One thing, there a good number of portals you have placed in the portals section. I would say that with the recent controversy of single page portals based on navboxes, links to portals based on navboxes won't be accepted by the community. From what I can see you have only linked maintained / non-navbox based portals. (For your interest you can see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Mass-created portals based on a single navbox and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Second batch of mass-created portals based on a single navbox). Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 12:39, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

  @Dreamy Jazz: I was not aware of that. Thanks for the heads-up. -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 15:35, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

References

• @ReconditeRodent: I edited the alternate version to see how it looked with File:Wikipedia logo letters banner.svg. I kind of like that as well. Had not seen the Russian and Spanish main pages before. -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 15:35, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

• It might be good actually if there's a way for the welcome message and the date to stack if the window is resized and they would overlap. (It shouldn't be a massive problem though since presumably the mobile version will stay the same.) ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 15:58, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

  Yeah that would be great. Or maybe even better if the right element is hidded if there is an overlap. This is a test design, so currently it doesn't seem possible due to all the overlapping elements in the banner (the background and the gradient), meaning I'm forced to use the position property. I'm sadly not proficient enough to know how to solve that. -- Jsdo1980 (talk) 18:04, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

  Jsdo1980, you could use @media styles. (i.e. under a certain width you could say that other styles apply). For example, you could set bottom:0; (and remove top:0;) the statistics part of the welcome message and increase the height of the welcome message.

  For example (illustrative only):

  @media all and (max-width: 334px) {

  #welcome-message-statistics {

  top:auto;

  bottom:0;

  }

  #welcome-message {

  height:12em;

  }

  }

  I got a working draft version using chrome's inspect element. It is supported by virtually all browsers (minus IE <9) (caniuse statistics). Bearing in mind that this would only be used if the screen was made very narrow and wouldn't affect anything if the browser is less than IE 9, I suspect that the issue with pre IE 9 support won't be a big deal. There may be other ways to deal with this, but this is the first one that popped into mind. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 21:57, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

• I don't view or use the Main Page much, but I'm neutral to mildly positive on the new design. My only complaint is that I dislike the pale blue gradient near the top. Alsee (talk) 01:06, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. I really like this. Good job so far, Jsdo1980!! I hope you have received the constructive feedback you were looking for as well. If you continue with this proposal elsewhere, please ping me. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 02:45, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

  Oh, I do like that you include the time top-right corner (I kid you not; I sometimes make edits just to figure out what time it is here.. this would be a lifesaver), but I suggest that maybe it not be linked and be appended (UTC) just like in a signature (ie. no periods). Readers might get confused otherwise, and if we link them then suddenly Monday will get a spike in views that we really aren't equipped to deal with. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 02:49, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

@MJL: The second box under Preferences -> Gadgets -> Appearance has the option to display the UTC time by the user buttons. Might be useful. -A lad insane (Channel 2) 03:03, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

@A lad insane: I appreciate the suggestion! –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 03:09, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

The possibilities of a custom magic word variable to get the number of watchers on a page

I recently discovered {{User Centijimbo calculator}}. I assumed that it could automatically calculate the number of Centijimbo's a person had, but this was not the case. I discovered that to keep templates such as this one up to date, an editor has to periodically update the number of watchers on Jimbo Wales userpage. It also requires editors who use the templates to update the number of watchers on their userpage periodically.

An idea I have to alleviate the amount of maintenance needed for these templates is, to either add a new magic word variable into mediawiki or define a custom magic word variable for enwiki, which could return the number of watchers for the current page or a specific page. I envisage this would work similarly to the magic word variable {{PAGEID}} which either returns the current page's ID or the ID of a named page. This magic word may have more applications than just keeping a users Centijimbo count up to date, however, currently I am unsure what else it could be used for. I would appreciate any opinions and thoughts on this idea, including other ways such a magic word variable could be used. Thanks, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 10:08, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

What conceivable use could this have other than to allow a handful of WP:NOTHERE types to goof around with userboxes? (The userbox you mention is currently used by a total of four people.) I struggle to think of any legitimate reason for ever wanting to know that the number of watchers of any given page has changed; there's arguably a case that on a handful of topics it might be useful to track spikes in the numbers of watchers over time, but those would be vanishingly rare as the pageview numbers will almost invariably be a better indicator of levels of interest (the majority of watchers of any given page are virtually without exception long-departed accounts which never unwatched the page before they retired or were blocked). ‑ Iridescent 10:14, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Iridescent, there are other templates. The most popular (I think) is User:Audacity/centijimbo (however this only has 149 uses). I do see that this magic word variable would have little use apart from counting Centijimbo's. Thanks, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 10:22, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, and Template:Annual readership (and the like) covers any relevant uses of page views, which is as you mention the more interesting and useful metric. Watchers are vanity, pageviews are coverage. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 11:00, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Button for the opposite of "minor" edit?

I suspect something like this has probably been proposed before, but I couldn't find it.

The "minor" button is useful for editors to flag their edit to be (in their opinion) unlikely to be of interest to other editors to review. That helps other editors focus their efforts elsewhere, where it's more likely to do some good. It's a great button (except when misused, but that's a different subject).

Now, how about the opposite? I make an edit that's a needed improvement, well and good, but compared to average kind of changes I make, rather than unlikely, I think this is one more likely to benefit from review. Maybe it's a bit complicated, might have some possible consequences or side-effects, or maybe it could be just a start for other editors to come and expand upon.

Okay, "that's what the talk page is for", I'd bet I'd hear. From what I've seen on talk pages, almost all the sections (except for bot-generated ones) are about issues that demand discussion. I don't see how there's an obvious bright line between those issues that absolutely need discussion and those that don't; so it seems we err on the side of not discussing things on talk pages. That's understandable; no one wants to go through the whole process of formalizing a new discussion on the talk page, just to find that (as they suspected but weren't certain) no other editor finds its worthy of any notable response. Talk pages are basically used as the last resort for editing, and I wouldn't change that. I'm sure we don't want to try forcing editors to start more discussions on the talk page when they may not be needed; that's a lot of additional effort, and the talk page would get cluttered with unimportant issues obscuring the important ones.

This button fills the gap between those edits requiring discussion and those that might benefit from it. The editor clicks this button on their edit of interest, and if any other editor, seeing the button's tag on the edit, reviews it and thinks it should be discussed, they can start a discussion, knowing for certain that there's a discussion to be had. If none do, everyone's happy, and there was no wasted effort.

Although the opposite of "minor", rather than calling this proposed button "major", I think I'd go for something like "interesting".

And, interestingly enough, this could be the default button for all new users. After the user has become savvy enough to know how and why, the user can remove this default setting in preferences.

Oh, and at least some of that bot-generated discussion clutter could be eliminated by those bots simply using this button instead.

--A D Monroe III^(talk) 22:45, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

@A D Monroe III: can you describe the problem you are seeing with bots a bit more? Bots can already pick normal/minor AND bot/not-bot flags on each edit. Most routine bot edits are marked 'bot' already to avoid bothering watchlists and recent changes. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:07, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't have any problem with bots that warrant specific attention; I only mentioned bots here as sort of an allegory. But since I mentioned bots, I'll respond, but I don't want this whole idea to center on bots; this button's value isn't based on bots.

Yes, bots can and do use the "minor" or "bot" flags, and that's fine. The "bot" flag means "automated edit", and the "minor" flag means "small and obvious change", with both indicating less review is needed. But, again, I'm talking about the opposite kind of edit. Say there's a bot that, despite its excellent massive contributions, can sometimes cause additional work to be done depending on the article's current detailed context, which only the article's current editors can know. So the bot must alert those humans to review its work. This is currently done by the bot adding a new section to the talk page. (Being bots, their template-driven context-free overly-formal talk page entries, by necessity, are... um... let's say "less than thrilling".) Only a couple bots now running do this; I suspect there could be more bots like this, but we're reluctant to have a lot of bots cluttering talk pages, so we reluctantly decide to not let them run, loosing their potential great mass of good contributions. But this new button could do much of the same job to urge review without the annoying talk page clutter. More bots!

(I haven't heard of this, but guess that a bot that uses "bot" flag but not the "minor" flag could be interpreted as "please review this bot's edit". Is that true? If so, great, we should announce this better, but more importantly, where's my button for the same thing?)

Again, bots are not the main point here; I bought it up as an example of the kind of edit that could use this new button. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 15:13, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

@A D Monroe III: thanks for the updates, just looking for ways we can improve bot interactions even if this doesn't go anywhere. In general bots making content-related edits that should be reviewed should not use the "bot" flag on that edit. These should be uncommon at best, but if you have some good examples we can look at that behavior (and feel free to bring it up at WP:BOTN. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:43, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Not a bad idea, but what is wrong with putting something to the effect of "please review" in the edit summary? There's also the mw:ORES review tool, which flags "potentially damaging" edits. Eman235/talk 23:11, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

("Potentially damaging" is, I hope, not applicable to an "opposite of minor" edit; I don't think editors should be encouraged to have their edits cross this line just to get some attention.)

I agree that edit summaries are the best way to do this right now. Edit summaries are limited, so this works best if the indication is terse, right? To be most effective, we could advise people to have the edit summary include the phrase "please review" (as suggested) or "interesting" or whatever we decide. If we go that way, to be sure they get it correct, we should have some way to have this phrase generation automated, like with a button. And then we could have reviewing tools search for this exact phrase.

Taken together, that's identical to my proposal here. I think a tag is better than a phrase, though. But, maybe we could start implementing this by just a new guideline on edit summaries? --A D Monroe III^(talk) 15:45, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

• Don't we already have the opposite of "This is a minor edit" with the "Watch this page" box? Vorbee (talk) 15:03, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Watchlist is similar, but it works the other way around. Putting something on my watchlist means I want to review other editors' changes. If I want other editors to review my edits, I can't force it onto others' watchlists. And, watchlist is per page, not per edit. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 14:32, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

• Is it possible to mark content which changes a fair percentage of an article as major automatically? I think as we already have the diff size, this could be easily done by tweaking the ui. Viztor (talk) 21:23, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

We kind of have a weak version of this already, as edit history gives the size of each edit (it's the delta size, so not perfect in this respect). I'm okay with enhancing tools to automate finding edits to review based on various criteria, but that wouldn't address what I'm asking for here. I want a tag that I decide to attach to one my own edits, indicating that despite any and all superficial characteristics of this edit, it still might be good for others to double-check it. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 15:07, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Add a "changes since previous editor" link to diffs

Often when I'm patrolling for vandalism, I'll find an edit that is the second or third sequential edit that user has made to the article. Here's an example of what I mean. In order to determine whether contributions are vandalism, I like to view all of the sequential changes the user made to the article, like this. In order to get to that diff view however, I need to go to the revision history, select the previous editor's contribution, and click "compare selected revisions". It would make my work a lot easier if in the diff view there was a single link you could click that showed all of the sequential changes a user made to the article. Thoughts? Anne drew (talk) 15:37, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Hmm...I distinctly remember having this feature for a while, through some gadget or script. I think it also had a "changes since my last edit" button. Eman235/talk 17:22, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

If that editor's edits are the latest revisions, you can use the "cur" link from the most recent edit by a different user. That's maybe not the shortcut you're looking for. Something like this is already implemented into pending changes, it's probably trivial for someone to design a script for you. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:37, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Is it really a problem if it takes a couple of seconds longer than it could to display this? It would be a good idea if people such as vandal fighters slowed down a bit to think rather than produce immediate sub-second reactions to edits. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:16, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Of course efficiency matters – especially if you're evaluating dozens of edits every day. If diffs took ten seconds to load that would also be a problem. Anne drew (talk) 18:39, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Efficiency only matters when things are got right. Those ten seconds, if you spend them thinking, go some way to giving you time to get things right. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:59, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Hm—might the revision slider help at all? Eman235/talk 18:56, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, thank you. Anne drew (talk) 19:10, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

We need to severely discourage use of Social Media Corporations for Wikipedia and Wikimedia business

In the course of the Fram debacle over the last week, we have seen two cases of WMF insiders Twitting at each other about how contemptible the community and community matters are: [1] [2] These should not be taken as one-off or two-off problems: the use of Twitter is inherently incompatible with Wikipedia business. Here are some reasons why:

1. These Twitter conversations are, first and foremost, a theft from the community. We have talk pages, we have Meta, we have mailing lists, we have Bugzilla, we have countless ways to communicate freely and without having to submit to the terms, conditions, and censorship of a private monopolistic corporation. Using "social media" steals our right to be involved, to respond, for many sites even to read what is going on, unless we submit to outsiders' legal terms.
2. Twitter is prone to manipulation by armies of bots or legions of biased outsiders with agendas, making it far less viable as a means of gauging support than the signed comments of experienced editors.
3. Twitter creates Minimum Prosecutable Units, devoid of context or details, which are prone to be used to damage the reputations of those who use them.
4. Twitter conversations are nearly impossible to follow very far.
5. Twitter usage inspires insiders to try to ram unwanted formats -- like Flow -- and unwanted dictatorial ideas and structures -- like Superprotect and the desysop of Fram -- against the will of a more democratic community.

For these reasons, we need a formal proposal to STRONGLY DISCOURAGE the use of Twitter accounts for anything other than the original expedient reason given for creating them, which is to say, for "outreach". Outreach means those innocuous little bot-like messages about our articles and events. Not decision making, not debate, not snide comments about editors or news stories!

The text I'm thinking of is something like:

Editors with advanced positions or holding positions of trust in the community or Wikimedia organizations are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED from using privately owned social media to conduct conversations of relevance to Wikipedia decision making, policy, or software design. Conversations of relevance to the work of Wikipedians properly belong on forums within our network of organizations.

I could use some advice on how better to put this. But we need something, and we need it last week. Wnt (talk) 11:12, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

• If nothing else, this would have to be a Meta-RfC. I'd also say that it should clarify that things could be announced, but shouldn't be used for ongoing considerations/disputes/discussions. I realise the "conduct conversations" part sort of covers this, but you could conduct a conversation (esp a positive one) about a mutually-agreed change. i.e. it could be used if there wasn't ongoing discussion on-wiki. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:58, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
• I think what we have at WP:CON is all the guidance we need: "Off-wiki discussions. Consensus is reached through on-wiki discussion or by editing. Discussions elsewhere are not taken into account. In some cases, such off-wiki communication may generate suspicion and mistrust." Outside of consensus-building – and neither of these recent examples are attempts at influencing consensus – it's up to editor discretion where they choose to discuss Wikipedia. We're not some kind of a cult that needs to tell its members where or with whom they can discuss what happens here. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 13:22, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

  We're not some kind of a cult that needs to tell its members where or with whom they can discuss what happens here I agree with that. There may be a way to somehow educate about the potential issues, without dictating how people can use their time and communicate, however... —PaleoNeonate – 00:05, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Process ideas for improving civility and avoiding harassment

Some recent events have highlighted that, as a community, we may not always deal as effectively as we might with issues of civility and (perceived) harassment. I don't want to rehash those events here (as they're already being discussed in enough fora), but I wanted to discuss how we could tweak our processes so we might encounter such issues less often in the future. I have three suggestions. I would appreciate some assistance in transforming these ideas into concrete proposals. I'm sure that my ideas are not wholly original, so I would also appreciate pointers to prior discussion of similar ideas.

Firstly, it is my perception that a lot of incivility and other conduct issues arises from content disputes that spiral out of hand between a small number of editors. By the time others get involved, battle lines have been drawn up and the conduct issues require administrators to use their tools. What I would like to see is a system that encourages earlier involvement of other editors in content disputes before they escalate into conduct issues. Looking around at our existing processes, Third opinion does this to some extent; I like that approach and I think it can work well. I particularly like the facts that it is aimed at content not conduct and that the third parties are discouraged from joining the fray by editing directly. This allows the disputants to work together to resolve the issue instead of simply taking sides and holding grudges. The two main drawbacks to 3O (in my view) are that people don't (know about it or think to) invoke it, and 3O requests may not be handled very promptly. If we could find ways to make 3O better known, both for editors in content disputes and for potential third parties, then I think it would work even better.

Secondly, in cases where we have a problem editor, I think it would help to have more people involved in the response. It is perfectly valid, on finding one problem edit, to dig into a user's contributions to see if the problem is chronic. Similarly, the imposition of sanctions does not make an administrator involved. Nevertheless, I think there are a number of reasons why it is better to have many experienced editors dealing with a specific problem editor. For close calls, opinions may differ on how best to handle a situation, and someone may have a creative idea on how to turn a problem editor into a productive contributor. I think that it makes a big difference to users if they can see a broad consensus against their problem behaviour rather than repeated criticism and sanctions from a single editor, no matter how experienced or privileged. This is a particular problem for highly-focussed noticeboards where most of the work is done by a small number of editors/admins. Could we find a way to make it easier to pass investigations and long-term monitoring on to other editors? Could we somehow make it so that we don't put administrators in the position of repeatedly imposing sanctions on the same editor? Remember, if it's the right thing to do, then someone else will do it.

Thirdly, users faced with intractable content disputes or conduct issues often respond poorly, whether by retaliating with their own bad conduct, or by bringing the issue to a noticeboard in a way that ultimately does not work out well for them. Perhaps we could have some system whereby experienced editors can act as sympathetic advisors to users facing such problems. These advisors could discuss how the conduct of all participants aligns with policy and guidelines, give suggestions on how to de-escalate the situation, assist the user in reporting the situation, and give a candid assessment of the likely outcome. While the advisor may communicate their perspective to other users on talk pages, similarly to third opinion, they should not directly involve themselves in content disputes and administrator advisors should avoid using their tools (or threatening to do so). The advisor can withdraw at any time and is explicitly not committing to represent the client or advocate for them in any proceedings. The client can, within reason, seek another advisor if they are not happy with the advice. It is possible that OTRS serves this purpose to some extent, but I have no experience of it.

Bovlb (talk) 04:05, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

I've just one comment at this point: all editors need to be aware of linguistic and cultural differences. Jocular terms in one context may be seen as insulting to another reader. This goes beyond modes of address and includes terms that are acceptable in some areas but seem as obscene and blocked by edit filters in others. Random examples:

• "Hey dude" – So you are starting by assuming I'm an incompetent greenhorn.
• "WTF" (particularly if spelt out) – Blocked by businesses. Also include "MFs" and "SoB".

I'm sure you see the pattern. Use of any of the above will be seen as a light hearted attempt to diffuse a situation in some areas but act as a red rag to a bull in other areas. Regards, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:03, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Bovlb, your second idea sounds like a proposal to revive Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Hmm. I see this as serving a rather different purpose from RFC/U, although I agree they are both intended to bring in a wider audience. RFC/U was intended to provide a one-time examination of a user's history by many users. I'm talking about diffusing responsibility for ongoing handling of (potentially) problem users over time. In general, a specific edit only requires one experienced editor to look at it; I'm trying to find a way to reduce the extent to which he same editor deals with multiple edits by the same user over time.

Currently we have a system whereby some editors will find themselves dealing with the same users repeatedly, either because they continually encounter them, or because they choose to monitor their contributions over time. In the latter case, we are clearly being very inconsistent because most editors do not do this sort of long-term follow-up, and it is understandable that users targeted for such follow-up would feel unusually scrutinized and, perhaps, harassed.

I held back from being too specific about solutions, partly because I wanted to get agreement about the general principle and partly because I felt my text was already too long, but here are a couple of specific examples to illustrate what I intend with my second point:

* We create a process for a centralized "user watchlist". Any administrator can add a user to the watchlist for some specific length of time (a week, a month, a year). We might have separate watchlists for different types of problem, such as civility, copyright, unsourced BLPs, and promotional spam. We provide a way for any editor to see recent contributions by users on the watchlist. Edits by these users will therefore be temporarily subject to increased scrutiny by many editors. This is a lightweight way to protect the encyclopedia from long-term problem users without imposing direct sanctions or restrictions, and without putting the burden on a single editor.

* We change the guidelines for administrators to discourage them from imposing sanctions on the same user repeatedly except in the most clear-cut of cases. We emphasize this guidance and expand on it in the context of specific noticeboards. This ensures that repeated and escalating sanctions have many hands on them rather than falling within the discretion of a single admin.

Bovlb (talk) 19:28, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

• T&S themselves turned down the desire for such a user-watchlisting system in the past. I agree that it avoids 1 user being accused for harassment concern, but I would personally say this is something most users would find more problematic to be on. A similar concern "feels like a gang rather than 1 pursuing editor" applies to the second one (however (un)reasonably). Both are absolutely good ways of resolving the original concern, but I'd just be concerned that these methods could be implemented and we'd actually get more complaints. I think if we opted for one we'd need a T&S signoff saying that they'd accept it. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:53, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

@Nosebagbear: Thanks. I'd rather discuss whether it would be a good idea for the community than speculate about whether T&S would permit us to do it, but do you have a link for where they turned it down? Also, I agree that users might find it stigmatizing to be on such a list, but perhaps less so than being blocked, and we could use it as a softer alternative to blocking. Being on a user watchlist only affects you to the extent that you want to continue making problem edits without interference. And if there are complaints, the diffusion of responsibility makes them complaints against the community rather than against one editor/admin. Cheers, Bovlb (talk) 19:48, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

phab:T2470 has been where a chunk of discussion was; there was also the CommTech wishlist item. I don't know where T&S rejected the task, but CommTech did so. --Izno (talk) 20:43, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

On that page it notes at the top that the safety and support team (the precursor to T&S, I believe) were involved in saying no. Elsewhere I remember reading that CommTech had some initial concerns and raised it with the safety team who were distinctly against it. There is something to not letting our T&S fears stop us from thinking of ideas, I definitely concede. Nosebagbear (talk)

Thanks for the links. The set of proposals described there all differ slightly from my suggestion, although some of the same concerns still apply. I was envisioning that the project would have a handful of user watchlists maintained by admins according to specific criteria similar to WP:BLOCK. As with blocking, being put on a watchlist could be appealed and admins held responsible for abuse, but the whole process is less interference to a user's activity than blocking. But my key point here is that is better all around if problem users received feedback from many other users instead of repeated feedback from one, and this was just an example of something that might achieve it. Bovlb (talk) 02:33, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I have sometimes wondered about rotating duties, such as working a limited shift at a busy noticeboard. For example, you'd sign up to be the primary person (or one of them) to deal with ANI for whatever discussions begin on Mondays from 14:00 to 15:00 UTC, and the rest isn't your problem. And after a while (somewhere between a month and a year), you rotate out to a different area, with our grateful thanks and the hope that you'll really enjoy RSN or CCI or whatever it is that you decide to pick up next. The system by which some people spend all their volunteer time, for years on end, semi-OWNing a drama board isn't good. That kind of situation means that the community is in trouble if certain editors leave (and all editors will eventually die, so we shouldn't design for the opposite), and the editor gets a skewed view of the whole project (everything's self-promotion if you live at NPP long enough, everything's an interpersonal war if you live at ANI long enough, etc.). Of course we can't force volunteers to show up on a particular schedule, but I think we could do somewhat better than we do now with encouraging people to learn new skills, train their future replacements, and engage in a balanced variety of activities. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:15, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Indeed; if we had an admin who was particularly experienced in something really complicated and thankless where few people wanted to get involved, such as conducting bulk contributor copyright investigations for historic pages where the bots are useless as the pages are already mirrored, or monitoring the new pages feed for spammers, they could help train… Oh. Wait. ‑ Iridescent 19:55, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing and Iridescent: - both of your points here are accurate, which somewhat combine into a "there are a handful of extremely technical, tedious, tasksets (WP:ACC is another tough one). Perhaps as a method of alleviating multiple problems at once, we should look to see what can be done to encourage individuals to do a few hours each week on a less standard area. I imagine it'd be a nuisance start-up, but it only needs partial success to help with both succession-planning and avoiding apparently-but-not harassment from all corrective edits coming from 1 person. I'm sure this has been tried before, but there's probably more community attention now than there was. Nosebagbear (talk) 20:56, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

A few hours a week for a long time, or follow it for a month (and then walk away)? Maybe pick "a major and a minor". We could probably come up with multiple ways to conceptualize it. Even making (updating?) a list of 'service areas' could help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:39, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@Aquillion suggested an anonymous reporting system that hits my first and second points: it makes it easier to get help earlier; and it is likely that different admins would respond to reports about a specific user over time (and it could even be made a constraint of the system). Bovlb (talk) 22:53, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

@Stephan Schulz suggests "editor representatives", which is arguably similar to my third point above. Bovlb (talk) 20:53, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

@Calliopejen1 suggests having ArbCom accumulate complaints about a single user (presumably from multiple complainants), that are too petty to act on individually, but which form an actionable case in aggregate. This is similar to Aquillion's suggestion above. Bovlb (talk) 00:31, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

@Isaacl wrote an interesting essay suggesting that consensus decision-making easily becomes homogeneous and repetitive, and it favours those who are less accommodating. My first point above is related, in that I want to find ways to involve more editors in content disputes earlier, which should reduce homogeneity. Similarly, my second point seeks to increase diversity in the response to behavioural issues. My third point touches on ways to help editors frustrated by a lack of accommodation. Bovlb (talk) 16:36, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

The first two points you mention were related to unmoderated discussions (that is, left up to the participants to decide en masse how to proceed), and not about consensus-based decision making. My point on homogeneity is that with English Wikipedia's current traditions for unmoderated discussions, it's really hard to keep a thread focused on one subject if many other editors join the thread and want to talk about something else. You can get more editors involved earlier, but if a group of like-minded editors join the conversation and re-direct it to their key concerns, the thread is now one of tens of others discussing the same issues. isaacl (talk) 19:26, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

I once participated in a RFC/U, and found that it was a useful way to have a number of other editors look closely at, and comment on, one editor's history in a structured process. RFC/U was dissolved in part because the remedies were non-binding. I support efforts to restore RFC/U and address limitations that the RFC/U system had. I also support development of a more structured conflict resolution system that does not involve Arbcom. One problem with ANI discussions is the lack of structure, a concern which I raised several years ago in Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)/Archive_16#ANI_discussion_structure_and_lack_thereof. Arbcom cases are highly structured, despite WP:NOTBURO.Dialectric (talk) 19:59, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

RFC/U sounds like a good idea, and certainly introduces a user to a diversity of views on their contributions. I fear that it brings a strong risk of the user feeling harassed, however. Has anyone studied the outcomes of RFC/Us? Do editors take on the criticism and improve? Or do we just end up at a noticeboard later? Are there cases where a smaller intervention earlier might have been more efficient or effective? Bovlb (talk) 21:28, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

As I recall from the time when RFC/U was closed, requests were getting low participation (as can be partially seen by looking at the archives for the last two years). Its non-binding nature meant there was little incentive for a subject to engage. The primary reason for filing requests was that it was a mandatory precursor to having an arbitration case accepted about a given user's conduct. As a result, it got treated as a box to check on the way to arbitration. isaacl (talk) 03:30, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

I started this discussion about ways improve civility and to avoid(the perception of) harassment because I wanted to hear from others, so I am trying hard not to contribute the majority of text on this page. I have therefore put down some of my ideas in longer form as an essay. It's a work in progress, so please be gentle. Bovlb (talk) 22:47, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia connection with Academic Research through Wikiversity

Wikipedia initial goal was to be an encyclopedia, it has grown so much and I wonder why should we limit it's potential.

In Wikipedia, I can learn about the current peer-reviewed knowledge, but what if we want to advance that knowledge?

We can't share or talk about primary research, we are just prohibited from doing that, and WP does not point us to a place where we could do it.

I was just reading about Wikiversity, and I saw we can do that there! v:Wikiversity:Original_research

But how many people got frustrated by receiving a WP:NOR policy as a reply? We could direct those people to Wikiversity!

A problem is that Wikiversity is kind of confusing to someone who is not used to it.

So I think we could do something like:

In the Global Warming article, or on the top of it's talk page, it would be written:

"You can discuss and talk about the current research on this topic at wikiversity:Global warming or wikiversity:Project proposal:global warming/Brainstorming."

I don't understand Wikiversity much yet to be able to say where a corresponding discussion about Clathrate gun hypothesis should be started, or about a new drug targeting GABAA receptor that doesn't affects memory.

So someone who already has experience in Wikiversity could also share opinions on this idea.

−Arthurfragoso (talk) 18:29, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

We already have {{Wikiversity}} template for this. Ruslik_Zero 18:20, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Let's get rid of the Wikipedia store

Would it be a good idea to get rid of the Wikipedia store? The Merchandise giveaway program seems to be some self-congratulating bullshit for a tiny handful of users. Why have a commercial store with shitty overpriced merch on a non-profit website anyway? They appear to be abusing the work of volunteers to sell 34 dollar (30 euro) notebooks (they cost 50 cents in walmart)... https://store.wikimedia.org/products/vision-statement-notebook The Wikipedia store should not be allowed to profit from the hard work of volunteers in this way imho. Rong Qiqi (talk) 01:32, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

@Rong Qiqi: The Wikimedia Foundation supports the store in order to help branding efforts. Getting rid of the store entirely would probably require support from the global community (including non-English projects) as well as the WMF, but if you want to start a proposal to remove the sidebar link to the store, I'd recommend going straight to WP:VPR. There's not much idea development that can be done on this at the Idea Lab. --Yair rand (talk) 06:04, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Internet Archive link issue

I have a question about the use of sources. It's not a question about a specific source, it's a bit more general, so I didn't choose to raise this at RSN. It may well lead to a policy change or refinement but I don't have a specific proposal at the moment so on using this forum to bat around ideas. It is motivated by a request posed at OTRS ticket:2019051110000238, but knowledge of the original request isn't necessary to understand the issues.

It is quite common for links to sources to go dead. For this reason, many sources are copied to the Internet archive, and if a particular source is found to be dead, the reference template can be modified to point to the Internet archive.

There are many reasons that a link may go dead. I'll discuss three of them, although there may be more.

• Type 1 - Reorg. The source might be maintained by an organization or website the chooses to restructure their URLs. The old URLs may become dead, but the original material is not missing it is simply at a different URL. This is very common but unrelated to the the substance of my subsequent discussion so I'm just mentioning it to get it out of the way.
• Type 2 - Withdrawn. The link is dead because the copyright holder removed it deliberately, presumably because they no longer stand behind it which could arise from their own independent investigation or as a result of another party successfully challenging the veracity of the content
• Type 3 - Failure to maintain. This covers a variety of options including the copyright holder simply failing to renew the website license, or choosing to take down material for reasons other than the veracity of the material.

We find the Internet archive particularly useful in the case of type 3 dead links (it also has temporary value in the case of type I, although those can typically be updated and the Internet archive link dropped).

An important point is that it may not be trivial to distinguish between type 2 and type 3. If the link is dead because the source material has been challenged, there might be a notice and a corrections location or some other indication that the original source should not be viewed as valid, but that's not necessarily the case.

The question I pose is what is Wikipedia's responsibility when it comes to dead links. Can we simply replace a dead link with an Internet archive link, or do we have the responsibility to determine whether it is a type 2, in which case we should not use the Internet archive link and we should remove or reword the article text that relied upon the reference?

It is not uncommon that someone writes in to OTRS to challenge some claim made in an article. When it is pointed out that the claim is supported by a reliable source, and the response is that the reliable source is in error, we typically explain that the person writing to us has the responsibility of contacting the publisher and getting them to withdraw, retract, rewrite and/or post a corrections notice. That sometimes happens. What happens if they successfully persuade the publisher to withdraw the original article (resulting in a dead link), but the publisher doesn't post a corrections entry? We are likely using the Internet archive link. Is it the responsibility of an aggrieved party to provide proof to us the link is dead because it was retracted, or is the responsibility on Wikipedia to ensure that the link is dead for some other reason? Or to put it differently, if the party successfully persuades the publisher to retract the article, is it also the responsibility to contact Internet archive and persuade them to remove the archive link? (In the latter case, I don't know Internet archives policy regarding such situations)S Philbrick(Talk) 20:47, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

• There are over 20 archive providers in use on Wikipedia. Even if one removes it from one archive provider it might exist somewhere else. Thus the responsibility of removing it from archives is burdensome and could be whack-a-mole as archives can reappear. And not all archive providers are flexible about removing archives. In the case of OTRS, maybe get confirmation from the publisher the source was in error, then delete the source and archive link from Wikipedia with an inline comment and talk page notice so it is not re-added. It gets more complicated because maybe that source is still used elsewhere for other non-controversial facts, and in other language wikis. -- GreenC 21:30, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

• Then there is the possibility that a statement published in a book or journal that would normally be regarded as a reliable source has been withdrawn/rescinded, or has come to be regarded as incorrect. How would that differ from the type 2 above? What would be the responsibility of Wikipedia for correcting such a statement? I think that if we, as editors, become aware that cited material is no longer accepted by the community working in the subject area, then we fix it. - Donald Albury 23:19, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

  Donald Albury, I was hoping to think to the narrower question but let me briefly comment on the broader question. Specifically, while one might expect that if a statement in an inherently online source is challenged, one might expect that link to go to a revised version or possibly disappear, but that's not an option if the link is to a published book (or other dead tree publication). However, we deal with this all the time. If, for example, a published book contains the phrase "Pluto is a planet", more recent events don't result in that book disappearing. If it's a popular book, the publisher might issue an updated version which has been edited. In this particular case, because of the interest of the claim, it will be discussed in multiple published reliable sources, so it's quite straightforward to modify the claim in an article even in the face of a published book which has a contrary view.

  I agree with your observation that if we become "aware that cited material is no longer accepted by the community working in the subject area, then we fix it" but some facts are going to attract a lot less attention then whether Pluto is a planet. I do accept that the same problem can arise. If a publisher as a statement in a book that's challenge successfully, then they might agree to cease publication of that edition but (subject to the specific agreement as a result of the successful challenge), they are not likely to be required to publicly publish a correction. In those circumstances, if someone writes to us tells us that a fact cited to a book is wrong, and the publisher has agreed to stop selling the book, but isn't obligated to tell us that, who bears the responsibility for the decision to retain or remove the fact?

  If a false claim were made about me, and published, and I convinced the publisher to remove the link and/or cease publication of the book, I'd be very unhappy if Wikipedia were continuing to use that information even after the publisher has admitted it is false. Who bears the responsibility for investigation? At present, it seems to me that Wikipedia would be telling me they can continue reporting this fact until such time as I could persuade a publisher to publicly disavow the claim. Is that fair? Is it truly not the responsibility of Wikipedia to do some due diligence in the case of the contested fact? S Philbrick(Talk) 00:59, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

• @Sphilbrick:, I think it all comes down to applying the policy on reliable sources. If information from a printed source that has been accepted as a reliable source is later superseded or shown to be wrong, then we need to rely on other reliable sources to determine that. Even the fact that a printed source has been withdrawn because of inaccuracy should be established by mention in a reliable source. In general, though, what we include in an article should be based on the preponderance of reliable sources. Sometimes, reliable sources disagree, and then we must determine the appropriate weight to give to each of those sources. - Donald Albury 12:49, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

• A few points: If a publisher is convinced to withdraw an online work as inaccurate, then the work should just be treated as an unreliable source and the ordinary procedure for that applies. Yes, on obscure topics it might be a while before anyone notices, but that's a general problem with a volunteer project and not a problem with archive links. If there's no indication as to why it was taken down, then I would always assume it's a maintenance issue unless someone explicitly complains—from personal experience at least, category 3 makes up the overwhelming majority of dead links on WP. If it's topically uncontroversial non-BLP material then I don't see why we would act on complaints without reference to RS. In that case the onus falls on the complainer. The tricky problem is if an online source about a living person simply disappears with no indication as to whether the problem was maintenance or inaccuracy, and someone then complains about the inclusion of the material. In this case I would point out that if the information is only available on that one website and isn't preserved on any RS after it goes down, then there's a high chance it doesn't meet the standards of WP:BLP anyway and if an OTRS ticket then comes in we should definitely respect the wishes of the subject as per the presumption in favour of privacy in BLP articles. —Nizolan ^{(talk · c.)} 11:54, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

How to make subcategorizing chemical articles easier

As a Wikipedia user who has spent a fair bit of time categorizing and subcategorizing chemical articles, I can say that something that would make the job a lot easier would be if when I went to a category like Category:Phenol ethers, an image of each chemical's structural formula would appear next to the chemical, I could click on the images of the chemicals that I wanted to categorize, and for each image that I clicked on, the corresponding page would be moved from…say…Category:Phenol ethers to Category:Catechol ethers. (While on the topic of handy tools for categorizing chemical articles, something that would be even easier but even more implausible would be if I could enter a SMILES, and all pages whose chemboxes had SMILES with the SMILES that I entered as a substructure would be automatically moved to a designated category and out of any supercategories.) However, neither of those are likely to be introduced just because one Wikipedian wants them, so I'm going to float a portion of the first idea: having the images appear next to the page name. Obviously this would only be for users who checked the appropriate checkbox in their preferences and wouldn't be the default. Although a similar thing happens when I mouseover the link to the article, sometimes no images appear (like for Flusoxolol), sometimes the image is not the structural formula in the infobox (like for Cicloprolol), and, more often than the other two, the image is too small/molecule too big for me to see the structural formula clearly without actually going to the page (like for Landiolol). I figure that changing the number of columns from three to two when the option is enabled would provide enough space for sufficiently wide images. (Also, something else that would help would be if PetScan had an option to check whether or not a page is in a given category or any of its subcategories (If there is already a way to make it do this, I do not know about it.); this would probably be quicker than manually going through the parents, grandparents, etc… of the individual categories that the page is in.) Are the last two requests too unreasonable? Is the first request more reasonable than I thought? Please give me feedback on what to propose. Care to differ or discuss with me? The N^th User 03:54, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Scope of Wikipedia self-governance

The recent WP:FRAM crisis has shown that there is a clear need to clarify which areas are the exclusive jurisdiction of the English Wikipedia community, what types of actions are completely off-limits for the Wikimedia Foundation.

If we know in advance what kinds of WMF actions we'll consider to be unacceptable, this comes with a lot of advantages, and it would mean we could avoid some of the worst conflicts. Ideally, we could prepare any response to violations in advance, the WMF could communicate to its employees what to avoid doing, and we'd all get along. The WMF says it is committed to project self-governance, and if the problem is that we haven't defined what that means on our end, we should get to work. Where are the boundaries?

Here's my first idea:

• What is the WMF specifically permitted to do? Their primary responsibility is to keep the website online, and to continue existing to be able to do so, so they're given ultimate responsibility for legal and software security/stability issues, and can take any action that is necessary to that end, without being subject to local consensus. The community and ArbCom have also specifically delegated certain areas (including child protection issues and threats of violence) to the WMF's Trust and Safety team, and they are allowed to enact global bans to work on those specific issues. The WMF also must preserve itself financially, so it is permitted to use the CentralNotice to run fundraising banners without community approval. (The WMF also controls its own internal operations and such, but that's not really relevant here on Wikipedia.)
• What is the exclusive jurisdiction of English Wikipedia local processes, excluding areas affected by the above? The actual pages, including articles, project policies (including all conduct and content policies, to which the WMF may not enact modifications), the main page, Common.js/css, and all other pages in any namespace other than Special. Assigning of local userrights, the AbuseFilter, blocks, page protection, basically anything that has a project-relevant log entry that doesn't begin with "Global". (The global ones are run by stewards & co.)
• Some areas are sort of shared control, currently without any clear rules outlining how decisions are made: Rollouts of new software features have been contentious, with the community generally asserting that decisions on major changes should be based on community consensus, while the WMF believes that they should make the final decisions on software. (Front-end changes have occasionally been reverted by means of Common.js. The aftermath of superprotect essentially confirmed that the WMF may not override that veto.) I don't know how this should work.

I'm probably missing quite a lot of stuff here.

(Note that this is the Idea Lab, and this is not a full proposal. The point here is to compile ideas, not to decide on solutions. I'd like for people to throw out ideas about ways things could be clearly divided. Don't worry if it's incomplete or not super-polished.)

--Yair rand (talk) 06:32, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

From a practical point of view, it's important that T&S's authority to ban extends further than child protection issues and threats of violence, at least nominally. If SanFranBans can only be issued for criminal activity, then the WMF are implicitly publicly accusing every person they ban of serious criminal activity, with all the defamation issues that raises. We can very strongly discourage T&S from ever using their superpowers in other circumstances, but I'm sure Legal would insist they at least nominally retain the "for any reason we see fit" clause. ‑ Iridescent 07:32, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Note that WMF being responsible for "software security/stability issues" can conflict with the community having exclusive jurisdiction over "Common.js/css" (and similar JS and CSS pages). Even if the community were to want to include web bugs in the CSS, or scripts with XSS vulnerabilities or scrips to mine cryptocurrency in the JS, that would rightly be removed by WMF. Anomie⚔ 12:46, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Certainly, hence the "excluding areas affected by the above". The WMF can also blacklock articles if they need to for legal reasons. The critical areas allow for overriding anything that would normally be the community's exclusive jurisdiction. --Yair rand (talk) 17:53, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Also note that our local policies are sometimes affected by Board resolutions, e.g. wmf:Resolution:Licensing policy or wmf:Resolution:Biographies of living people. Anomie⚔ 12:46, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

The BLP resolution doesn't seem to actually force anything, it just says that the board "urges" the global community to try to do certain things, which we certainly take into account, but it didn't create a policy on its own, I think. I don't quite remember how the licensing policy was formed, but I don't think it was a unilateral decision by the Board, was it? --Yair rand (talk) 17:53, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

The whole issue of what is on the remit of the Board/Foundation and what is in the remit of the community will always be subject to negotiation. Moreover, the Foundation has a legal existance as a corporation. The community is, well, a community, with no legal existance. In practice, that means that the enWiki community will have as much autonomy as the Foundation Board allows it to have. - Donald Albury 13:29, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't think that's accurate. We can, by committing to taking certain on-wiki actions, incentivise the WMF to not do certain things. (This is if we assume they care about the functioning of the project, which seems like a very reasonable assumption to me.) In any case, they want our decisions to matter. The board is made up largely of Wikimedia contributors, who take the principles of community self-governance seriously. --Yair rand (talk) 17:53, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't think it is a matter of what the WMF is allowed to do - if they want to lock the en.wikipedia db for a month, they are allowed, some people would be unhappy - but more of what we think that the WMF should leave to the community. IF (all caps) they think that they have to take more responsibilities than agreed, the least they could do is be clear and upfront about it and the community may show their agreement or disagreement. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 15:19, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm very glad that this discussion has been started; I think it's a very useful discussion to have. I also see it as something where we should spell out the things that we want WMF to leave to us, instead of doing themselves. Although not all-inclusive, something that is very key is that WMF should not attempt to resolve problems that the community here considers to be within the jurisdiction of ArbCom. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:40, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

• We need to distinguish between what the WMF is legally allowed to do, as the owners of this website who are only restricted by the laws governing their non-profit status, and what they should do to maintain this as a volunteer-generated encyclopedia. I rather think that they have recently had a short-term focus on the former, rather than on the latter which would continue the success of this project in the long term. And, I would add, they should recognise that this is not a social media site but a workplace. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:15, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
• Their primary responsibility is to keep the website online, which includes not only paying the bills for hosting, but also ensuring the website doesn't get shut down by local authorities, and that means the WMF must regulate how the website is used. Hence, the answer to questions like "What is the scope of Wikipedia's self-governance?" is "Whatever the WMF says it is, because they're the ones who are actually responsible for regulating this website and keeping it online". The community cannot govern itself while not taking responsibility for its own survival (keep the website online). So a better question might be, "What is the scope of self-governance the WMF will allow?" or better yet, "How do we go about making all WMF board seats elected by the community?" – Levivich 06:19, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

  @Levivich: If/when the board is entirely elected by the community, we will/would still have the issue of needing to clarify what areas we think the WMF should or should not generally be involved in, I think. --Yair rand (talk) 06:18, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

• The WMF may intervene either: When the community has asked it to and they have agreed to do so (such as handling child protection issues and threats of violence), and when legally required to under US law, e.g., DMCA notices. That's it. Of course in the case of a genuine software security problem they would be able to address that, but except in case of an absolute emergency, it would be preferable that they bring the issue to the attention of community interface maintainers rather than directly step in. I'm not concerned about the child protection and threat of violence intervention being limited to that, because truth is a defense to defamation or libel. If they're banning people for those things who didn't do them, well, I won't shed too many tears if they get sued. If they ban people who really did do them, well, again, truth is a defense. "You're slandering me! You banned me, and the only reason you place bans is child protection or threats of violence!" "You threatened to find out where another editor lives and burn their house down." "Well, yeah, but, uh...". That's not going to go anywhere in court. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 18:54, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

I think that some distinction will need to be made between wikis that bi and established enough where they can self govern (e.g. enwiki) and those that aren't there yet. For the latter, a channel should be there for community members there to intervene. Or maybe that WMF could do low key admin to help have a multi-wiki arbcom for those. North8000 (talk) 11:16, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Or, to make it simpler, that these are for enwiki, for wikis developed enough to self-governNorth8000 (talk) 20:18, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

@North8000: There's actually some precedent for this from Global sysops, which perform actions only on small wikis that have not opted-out, and other wikis that have opted-in. --Yair rand (talk) 20:54, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

@Yair rand: Thanks I didn't know that. Who appoints them? North8000 (talk) 13:15, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

@North8000: Global sysops are elected on Meta-wiki, in a system somewhat like the system for local admins, except with stewards doing the final appointment instead of bureaucrats. See m:Global sysops. --Yair rand (talk) 20:08, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

Category:Location user templates overhaul

Recent discussions about various subcategories of Location user templates (one, two, three) have lead me to believe that Category:Location user templates should be up for a wider discussion. In all three discussions, the distinction between "X of residence" and "X of origin" either has been the main point, or has been brought up in some argumentation. To have somewhere to start, I've drawn up an "Overly complicated option", from which the unnecessary bits can be chopped off.

Overly complicated option

Location user templates—the overly compicated overhaul

Keep in mind that this table shows only parts of the suggested structure, which are used as an example.

Category:Location user templates

Category:Location user templates by country or Category:User templates by country (both options—to replace1 Category:User templates by location)

Category:Location user templates by activity2

Category:Australia user templates

Category:United States user templates

Category:Place of residence user templates

Category:Place of origin user templates

Category:Travel user templates

Category:Australian city user templates

Category:New South Wales user templates

Category:US state user templates

Category:US city user templates

Category:Place of residence user templates by country3

Category:Place of origin user templates by country3

Template:User born on Earth ...

Template:User visited ...

Category:Travel user templates by country

...

...

Category:Alabama user templates ... Category:Wyoming user templates

A

Category:US city of residence user templates

B

...

...

• The template links are examples of where a template which does not fit into a category in the bottom row of the table would go.
• For categories around the green highlight: all ambigious or customizable user templates related to cities in US go in group A. In group B go other countries, like Category:German city of residence user templates.
• Category:Russian city user templates (recently merged) could be placed in Category:Place of origin user templates by country, Category:Place of residence user templates by country, and any other "Place of X user templates", due to all templates being customizable.
• Footnotes
  • 1 — this is mainly to subcategorize all the city-templates, because having both countries and cities in User templates by location is both confusing and not really helpful.
  • 2 — Category:Multiuse regional user templates could probably be a subcategory of Location user templates by activity.
  • 3 — in one of the three discussion linked above there was also a suggestion to rename "Place of X" to "City of X", but this does not account for other subdivisions of countries: states, regions, districts, counties, etc.

Overly simple option

Providing an instance of the other extreme option just for the sake of argument:

• Leave only a geographical category tree "Location user templates" > "Location user templates by country" > "Location user templates by city". This of course lives no good place for templates like Template:User visited.

Discussion

Is such a discussion worth having? I might have missed an interesting question in the list below, be bold to add new questions. —⁠andrybak (talk) 07:43, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

1. Do we need the "Place of origin" and "Place of residence" substructures under Location user templates? —⁠andrybak (talk) 07:43, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
2. In the "overly complicated option", I've left out categories starting with the word "Regional". Do we need to harmonize the category names to only use the word "Location"? For example, rename Regional interest user templates to Location interest user templates or Interest user templates by location. —⁠andrybak (talk) 07:43, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
3. Is such a big overhaul — a good idea at all?
4. Maybe a more gradual process with smaller discussions would be better? —⁠andrybak (talk) 07:43, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Comment, the categories should follow the templates. For cities, there is just one template per city. In other words, for a particular city there is no distinction between a city of origin template and a city of residence template. So the categories shouldn't make that distinction either. Marcocapelle (talk) 16:51, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

@Marcocapelle: that's not always true. For example, for Los Angeles, there are: {{User Los Angeles}}, {{User near Los Angeles}}, and {{User in Los Angeles}}. —⁠andrybak (talk) 17:15, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Fair enough, if there are more "near" templates we might have a "near" category. Similarly for the two others, although it is not clear to me yet how {{User Los Angeles}} and {{User in Los Angeles}} are different. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:20, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

@Marcocapelle: as promised, here's my plan to the middle ground between two extreme options presented above:

1. Harmonize existing "cities by country" categories (discussion).
2. Create new "cities by country" categories.
3. Move categories of cities from Category:User templates by location to new categories.
4. Because after previous step, it only contains country categories, rename Category:User templates by location to Category:User templates by country subcategorize Category:User templates by location, Category:Place of residence user templates, and Category:Place of origin user templates to Category:User templates by country and Category:User templates by continent (corrected 14:09, 26 July 2019 (UTC)). At this point, the left side of the table in "overly complicated option" would be implemented.
5. Categorize residence and origin userboxes into per country categories.
6. With the above finished and after conclusion of current discussion about Category:Residence user templates, the big picture state of Category:Location user templates will be more clear. For example, now it seems that the above plan would cause Category:Place of residence user templates and Category:Place of origin user templates to become obsolete, and could then be deleted, rather than merged or otherwise.

Basically, this plan tentatively answers "No" to the first question in the top post, leaves out the second question for later consideration, and answers "Yes" to the third and fourth questions. Notifications about all discussions were and will be added to WT:UB. —⁠andrybak (talk) 07:22, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

New categories: Category:User templates by country and Category:User templates by continent. —⁠andrybak (talk) 13:57, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

New NSF-funded project exploring genealogies of Wikipedia collaborations

Chenhao Tan and I are excited to announce a new three-year project funded by the NSF exploring the genealogies of online sub-communities in Reddit and Wikipedia. We'll be looking to recruit a Ph.D. student interested in human-centered data science as well as to partner with community moderators/administrators for interviews. Please get in contact if you're interested in either!

Read more about our project here and see the official NSF award information. The project also has a page on the Wikimedia Research with additional details about the research questions and methodology.

We are interested in eliciting ideas from the Wikipedia community about what kinds of genealogical relationships to prioritize (among WikiProjects? breaking news articles? policies?) as well as interviewing Wikipedia editors. I hope you'll get in touch on my talk page or by email if you're interested in contributing or brainstorming with us. Madcoverboy (talk) 04:37, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

• @Madcoverboy:, thank you for coming here early on, and there's clearly an awareness of data issues for even "public data" - users have been tracked down before even with no direct identifier. I've read both the medium article and the meta page - I understand the process with Reddit threads, but could you give an example of a potential use case/finding on Wikipedia (projects or policies, either's fine)? Nosebagbear (talk) 21:14, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Portals

There is currently a problem with portals. Some users make portals about anything, others think that we should have no portals or just the handful linked at the main page. There are many ones being periodically listed for deletion. We have Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines, which is currently disputed, and it is more a help page than a guideline page. An actual guideline to decide which topics deserve a portal or not (in addition to a help page about how to make a portal and what to include in it) may be more helpful than the current situation.

I have written Wikipedia:Notability (portals) to set some basic rules. Before making an actual proposal elsewhere, I would like to have some input from other users. Can the proposed rules be improved? Are there other criteria that may also be proposed? Cambalachero (talk) 22:09, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

@Cambalachero: we have not one but two active RFCs about portals. I think we should wait untill they close to see if they have any implications here. As to your specific proposal, it is no different from the many variations we've seen at Wikipedia talk:Portal/Guidelines that have failed to attract any level of consensus and even has some obvious flaws identified in previous discussions (seriously, we have 50,000 WP:Vital articles so that's a non-starter, even if constrained by other criteria). – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 18:45, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Internet Archive's textual search engine for image file formats

I think Wikipedia SW have been recently improved on some features. I hope someone have the time to have a look on the following link. Some months ago, the Internet Archive has introduced a simple, but useful keyword search engine that you may see at the right top of the page.

It works very fast and well both for modern and ancient manuscripts. If it has been released with a public domain license or at least with an open license, it can be hopefully integrated into the Wikipedia Commons search adavanced futures. Commons has some books published in a image format, as .tiff and .jpeg, not allowing users to a textual reasearch into their content. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.223.69.80 (talk) 19:52, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree a full-text search of scanned books on Commons would be very useful, particularly when done across all books similar to a Google Books search, thus able to find sources for adding citations. This would be incredibly useful for a lot of editors. The good news is that Internet Archive does OCR scans of texts and dumps the text file. So for the Holy Bible example, the files are located here and the text is in holybiblecontain00philuoft_djvu.txt .. The data is available to make Commons searchable. -- GreenC 14:45, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

reverts

i just wanted to point out that i am really often reverted on your wikipedia english, even when i give a source. i think there is a problem here. Something that makes you loss editors.

i think, when a people of another language write on your wikipedia and give a source (of any language) , people should read and translate source withe google translate, before reverting.

Editors (of another language) will not debate because, it is difficult for them. Most will prefer to do nothing when they are reverted (i often does nothing)

i think you should make statistic to see how the difference is, for the same individual, in a wikipedia of his language ; and in english wikipedia, what is the statistical revert on 100 or 1000 contribs for exemple. I think there is really a gap, and that discourage people from contributing here.

For me, the reason, i don't contribute here, is that i am too often reverted.

I don't know how to ameliorate that point, But i know you could measure it, in a first step.

note:i don't think i am unique in that case.That is why i write.

Vatadoshu^french 20:48, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

There is some further discussion at Talk:Hematogen#revert. Jc86035 (talk) 14:56, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

yes. But still, i think it is a problem more general. I don't speak about one revert. (i make a generality)

but perhaps the functionning is really different throughout the different wikipedia language. It seems like if there are more debat and conflict for each contribution here. Vatadoshu^french 16:53, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

External Links in a Publications Section

I have gotten some disagreement about my use of external links in a Publications section and I would like to get some additional opinions (and possible clarification in the WP:MOS if necessary). My read of the Manual of Style (e.g., WP:MOS#Section_organization) is that a Publications section (a list) in a biography is an Appendix outside the body of the article, and therefore there is no prohibition about using external links there (such links can be very handy in a geologist biography, where USGS works are readily available online). Henry G. Ferguson is an example of this use, and some discussion took place on Talk:Siemon_Muller.

So:

Q1: Is it OK or improper for someone to remove external links from a Publications section? (see, e.g., the history at Siemon_Muller). The idea that external links are only allowed in an External Links section or a References section seems widespread.

Q2: Is there a better way of formatting the links in an article such as Henry G. Ferguson?

(As a minor side point, I also be interested in opinions as to whether my tone in Talk:Siemon_Muller was out of line; I plead guilty to having gotten annoyed at this point. Please put any comments on User_talk:Finney1234. I'm not trying to stir anything up; I'm genuinely interested in whether I wasn't being a good Wikipedian).

Thanks, Finney1234 (talk) 20:46, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

From my perspective I am just looking for input as to whether the MOS should be adapted to allow for F's thoughts about how to handle ELs in a publications list section of any article. MarnetteD|Talk 20:54, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Generally external links should only be in 'external link' section. That's the whole purpose of the section. Anything else should use <ref> tags to refer to external sources. I am not sure there's any special type of content that cannot be referenced with ref tags. – Ammarpad (talk) 14:32, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Ammarpad Thanks for chipping in. My concern is that although your perspective is a common view, there is (as far as I can tell) *nothing* in the MOS that states that requirement. E.g., many articles will include external links in the References section, which is contrary to your suggestion. My reading (and I believe it's correct) is that in the MOS, external links are explicitly disallowed in the textual *body* of an article, but are allowed in Appendices such as "Publications" sections in a biography. If they should only be allowed in an "External Links" section, the MOS should be changed to state that (I, personally, am not going to make that proposal because I, personally, disagree with it).Finney1234 (talk) 15:41, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Ammarpad,MarnetteD As an example of another use of links in a Publications section, see the first 3 entries in Clyde_Wahrhaftig#Selected_Publications (these existed in the article before I started editing it). Is it more acceptable if the links are not explicitly visible in the reader-viewed text? These examples use a URL in the "cite" template (but they are *not* using <ref>). Maybe this is an acceptable solution.Finney1234 (talk) 17:49, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

In that article I think the links are OK. There's a PDF (its visibly clear what kind of link is that) and the other is doi id. But just don't make a wp:sea of blue because even with internal links people don't like that. – Ammarpad (talk) 18:09, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

It's pretty normal for published works to have links. I wouldn't necessarily call that section an appendix however. --Izno (talk) 01:11, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Izno FWIW, a Publications list is explicitly referred to as an appendix in WP:MOS/Layout#Standard_appendices_and_footers. It's part of my argument that nothing in the MOS prohibits external links in such a section (it's not the *body* of the article). Finney1234 (talk) 03:14, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

MOS:WORKS#Online books. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:11, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

(Ammarpad,MarnetteD,Bbb23) Thanks very much, Redrose64. MOS:WORKS#Online books makes it clear that the MOS explicitly sanctions external links in a Publications/Bibliography section, so I do not need to make a proposal for MOS clarification (consensus has already been reached). It is interesting/unfortunate that there is a widespread perception that such links are not allowed; can you think of any way to make this more obvious? Thanks.Finney1234 (talk) 13:56, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

If there is concern about this conclusion, possibly the term "external links" needs to be more clearly defined in the MOS. E.g., does "external links" only apply to reader-visible web addresses in a Publications section (as in Henry G. Ferguson), or does it also apply to web addresses embedded in the "url" field of a "cite" template (e.g., Siemon_Muller).Finney1234 (talk) 02:23, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

I think linking publication names should be fine (as in the cite template). Raw URLs are definitely not kosher and I'd also advise against peppering with links to Google Books and similar services (the articles linked don't suffer from the latter problem). Daß Wölf 04:12, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Daß Wölf. It sounds like you think the approach in Siemon Muller is OK, but you don't like the approach in Henry G. Ferguson, and I agree that Siemon Muller looks better and is probably the best approach. But I'm curious: is there anything in the MOS (or other Wikipedia documentation) that documents the disparagement of raw URL's in this context?Finney1234 (talk) 07:13, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

To be honest, MOS:LINK doesn't seem to state anything about it, but I don't think I'd ever format a list as in Henry G. Ferguson if going for a GA or FA. Daß Wölf 03:45, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Ammarpad,MarnetteD,Bbb23,Daß Wölf,Redrose64,Izno: I have posted this issue in Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#RFC:_Clarify_use_of_external_links_in_a_"Publications"_list_(17_Aug_2019) as an RFC. Please feel free to weigh in with your comments. Finney1234 (talk) 21:16, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia dispute resolution for complex disputes

Hi VP. I've been doing dispute resolution on WP pretty much forever, though I've come back and forth from WP now and then.

Back in 2011, I formed the idea of the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard, which has been in place for over eight years now (wow). At the time, it rapidly became a replacement for other processes on Wikipedia, namely the Mediation Cabal which was closed as superfluous to the Mediation Committee's formal mediation in this discussion. Late last year, a discussion ensued on closing the Mediation Committee, which did result in its closure.

Now, I've been mulling over the result of that discussion and various arguments for it's closure were made, that the process was under-used, too bureaucratic, ineffective at solving disputes, and redundant to other processes.

I am here because I see an actual gap in our processes for resolving disputes now, and am mulling over ideas on how to plug that gap. DRN is normally designed to handle disputes that are can be handled rather quickly (ideally within 2 weeks), RFCs generally for 30 days, and often for singular issues, and then ArbCom for conduct issues. MedCom aimed to plug that gap - issues that aren't necessarily a conduct issue, can be multi-pronged disputes covering a substantial portion of the article content, or take an extended period of time. They don't come often, but they do. Case in point - I'm taking one such dispute to mediate it privately, since it's not suitable for DRN anymore but I believe can be resolved by working through the content.

I don't really have a preference for how to fill this gap in our processes, but have a few thoughts/options so think the idea lab might be a place to start. In no particular order we could:

• Expand the scope or function of the dispute resolution noticeboard, possibly allowing subpages to be created for lengthy disputes to enable extended discussion.
• Re-open a variant of the Mediation Cabal (informal mediation), with similar rules to the former version, but we could a) Require discussion to have happened at DRN first b) Require the dispute to be about more than one particular item in an article/location (e.g. not just one sentence/source/paragraph etc).
• Re-open MedCom as is (unlikely)
• Re-create MedCom without any bureaucracy (e.g. requiring all to agree to mediation, requiring all processes to be exhausted previously, no formal committee of mediators, no binding resolutions)
• Re-create MedCom, but with some teeth to serve as a real form of DR for disputes (mediators are elected by the community, good faith participation is required, limited ability to enforce certain outcomes (e.g. WP:Binding content discussions style.)
• Some other ideas (I'm open to anything here really).

Since I don't have "the solution" to this one, I'd love to get people's input on this one. Steven Crossin 17:32, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't know if there can be a reasoned decision until some things are nailed down. A lot happens in 8 years, after all.

• Does the number of mediators/DRN volunteers factor into this? If participation is already low, how would another process help?
• Are there types of disputes that DRN has repeatedly been unable to handle? I mean unsuccessful cases, in-progress-but-turned-stale cases, or never-handled cases.
• Has DRN had success in resolving entrenched cases? (eg nationalist/religious/etc). I mean by any measure of success -- what constitutes "success" in content DR is a gray area, but that's another discussion (not that these discussions typically take place anymore, far as I can tell -- see my final para).
• If DRN does have success in entrenched cases, is there anything specific that is attributable to that success? What is attributable to the failures?

My biggest regret in closing Medcab was losing our IRC channel. MedCom lost its internal mailing list. DRN talk is largely administrative (it's a noticeboard, after all). Everyone is more-or-less solo these days, and I think we've lost a lot of our sense of community. Xavexgoem (talk) 21:15, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

• @Xavexgoem:, FWIW, the MedCab channel still exists, but it's been redirected to #wikipedia-en-drn. I'm actually rather interested in doing an analysis on RFCs to see how un/successful they are. I think there are still likely volunteers out there, but the format of DRN doesn't possibly work for some to get involved (e.g. I don't see it likely former MedCom members would move to DRN). I'd say it's most useful (DRN) for small scale disputes, entrenched long running disputes such as religious/nationalist ones normally take too long and need an experienced hand to work through issues at times. It's not always a conduct issue that causes DR to go haywire, but it sometimes happens due to not understanding policy or pure frustration over the process. Steven Crossin ^{Help resolve disputes!} 12:33, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

@Steve Crossin:: The problem with success is WP:CCC, and meatball:WikiNow, among other things. An example of "other things": I would consider a mediation a success if the guilty party (yeah, I said it) burns out. I consider a mediation a failure if the correct party (yeah, I said it) burns out. But either way, we're going to mark it as a failure. You have to account for a lot -- to the point of presumptuousness -- in considering what is a success and a failure.

And this is just one example of the things you and the rest of us need to do in considering what a good process for the project is. This talk needs to extend beyond processes, and I don't know if we can come to a conclusion (or even an inkling of a conclusion) unless we really open this discussion up about what it means to mediate on a wiki. Xavexgoem (talk) 01:17, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

In the recent discussions on managing poor behaviour, I have been advocating making process changes to encourage desired behaviour, and dissuade poor behaviour. I believe having better content dispute resolution mechanisms is a key area that needs improvement. Currently there is a strategic advantage in poor behaviour during content disputes; we need to make it a neutral or losing strategy. I plan to open up discussion on a proposal I am thinking of (in addition to general brainstorming), but I haven't written it up in detail yet. I've drafted some key characteristics I am trying to meet: prevent discussions from dragging on indefinitely, and avoid having a small number of voices unduly dominating discussion. I encourage others thinking of ideas to keep these aspects in mind, which I feel are large deterrents to editors remaining engaged in content-related discussions. isaacl (talk) 21:31, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

I think that User:Isaacl and User:Steven Crossin are referring to two different problems that sometimes overlap but are not really the same problem. Steven Crossin is referring to difficult or complex content disputes. Isaacl appears to be referring to conduct issues that are not sufficiently severe to require site bans. They sometimes overlap in that complex content disputes may be even more difficult to resolve if one editor is disruptive or POV-pushing. I think that there is more likelihood of making progress on difficult content disputes than on conduct disputes, because the WMF is apparently indicating that they have the right to meddle non-constructively; I don't think that an improvement to the handling of conduct issues is likely as long as the WMF is a purely disruptive force. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:57, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

By the way, I thought at first that the WMF might be willing to try to work with the community to improve its handling of harassment and other conduct issues. Unlike some editors, I think that our governance processes are deeply flawed, and that we are not likely to fix them without outside help because we are stuck in a suboptimal position. However, it is now clear that the WMF isn't planning to be part of a solution. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:57, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

No, as I stated in my comment, I am looking for improvements to content dispute resolution, which would forestall conduct from being an issue in the first place. isaacl (talk) 19:53, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Yes, User:Isaacl, on another reading I see that you were referring to dealing with the content aspect of a content-conduct dispute early enough that the conduct can be worked around, and that should be one of the objectives of dispute resolution. This is another way of what is sometimes called putting teeth into dispute resolution. The first step in that regard is simply to change the statement that dispute resolution procedures are voluntary to saying that dispute resolution procedures are voluntary but encouraged and that failure to take part constructively in dispute resolution will be held against a party. I still think that your ideas and those of Steve Crossin are largely separate, because you appear to be referring primarily to resolving disputes early, before conduct makes them intractable, and he appears to be referring primarily to resolving complex disputes after earlier steps have been followed. Comments? Robert McClenon (talk) 21:31, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Leaving aside the specific proposal I'm still developing, I am generally advocating that we need content dispute resolution procedures, no matter when they kick in, that provide incentives for desirable behaviour, and do not provide incentives for poor behaviour. For example, discussions that are unbounded in time provide an incentive for obstructionist behaviour. English Wikipedia's tradition of allowing decisions to be re-visited as often as any two editors are willing to discuss the matter provides an incentive to argue tendentiously. I think it's even more important for complex dispute resolution mechanisms to remove incentives for conduct we want to discourage. isaacl (talk) 22:05, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

• As I’ve commented previously in other places, speaking as someone with real world experience in dispute resolution, the biggest single think done wrong on Wikipedia with respect to dispute resolution is attempting to deal with interpersonal problems in public on the public record. These things should be done off the record, not strictly confidentially, but not on the street. I recommend the use of mediators, mediators who are kind, understanding, but carry a big stick in their back pocket. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:53, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
  • What big stick does User:SmokeyJoe propose? To limit mediation to administrators? To have a subgroup of administrators standing behind the mediation process? (I sort of favor the latter, but would like to know.) Robert McClenon (talk) 18:57, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
    • A big stick for a Wikipedia editor mediator would be their authority to ban a bad editor, with the option of referring the banned editor to ArbCom. The mediator must be able to explain their action to ArbCom, but the aggrieved editor has no necessary part to play in that. A big stick mediator will rarely want to use their stick, but when they do they use it based what they know first hand, not on what a complainer has merely said. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:39, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
  • Interpersonal problems often come to the attention of WP:ANI. I assume that SmokeyJoe is referring to interpersonal problems that complicate a content dispute, but are not so serious as to require interaction ban. (My own view, which is eccentric, is that two-ways IBANs don't work, and that one-way IBANs can occasionally be used as a step short of site bans, but that is my view.) Robert McClenon (talk) 18:57, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

One Volunteer's Thoughts on the Dispute Resolution Process

I have a few thoughts and comments on improving dispute resolution. I thank User:Steven Crossin for raising the issue, and I think that this is a good time to discuss improving dispute resolution, and that this is as good a place as any.

First, I think that the community made one of its stupidest and most bone-headed decisions in recent years in getting rid of the Mediation Committee, in spite of the usual two criticisms, which were that the committee had very few cases and that the committee had very few mediators. Perhaps the committee was not attracting new volunteer mediators because there were no cases. However, that is the past, and a lesson that sometimes the Wikipedia community can engage in collective stupidity. The Mediation Committee was too bureaucratic, but that could have been tweaked.

I think that improvements to the dispute resolution process can have at least two main aspects.

Triage

The first is a better triage of statements of disputes. Statements of disputes come in various kinds. There of course are some that are incomprehensible, and some that are clearly conduct disputes (sometimes filed by an innocent party, sometimes filed by the disruptive party), which need to be dismissed or sent to a conduct forum. There are also content disputes where there has not yet been a real effort at discussion. DRN does reasonably well at dealing with such disputes and telling the filers what to do next. Recently a lot of the disputes that come into DRN are either of two types of content disputes that appear on their face to be appropriate for DRN, but which may not be cases where moderated discussion is likely to be effective. They include cases where the filing editor says "Tell us who is right". If there are only two editors, this may be a request for a Third Opinion. Also, if one editor says, "Tell us who is right", the other editor may or may not be ready to listen. (That is a limitation of Third Opinion also.) Also some content disputes are of a yes-no nature, such as whether to include a fact in the lede, or whether to include a particular source (e.g., historian), and such disputes may waste a week of mediation before it becomes clear that mediation is not the answer because an RFC is the answer. Also, an improved triage process would identify disputes for which it may be necessary to go to a special effort to find a mediator. I currently am looking for a mediator who is willing to read and assess sources on history of India. An improved triage process might also identify, out of disputes that do need mediation, what type of mediation is needed, such as whether the fast track for which DRN is presently set up is in order, or whether a slower or heavier-weight process is needed.

Multiple Tracks

There should be at least two styles or tracks of mediation with different timetables. The first is disputes of the sort that DRN is currently oriented to, which I will call fast-track disputes. There are also disputes that need to be mediated in a slower manner. Perhaps there are no general conclusions about complex disputes, and perhaps every complex dispute is different, but I think that there should be at least a distinction between fast-track mediation and slower processes, and fast-track mediation should have the option of switching onto the slower track or a slower track.

A Role for the WMF?

An oldish idea that was proposed by User:Jimbo Wales two or three years ago at his talk page was that the WMF could provide professionally trained mediators to assist the community. I think that is an idea that is worth considering while the community and the WMF are trying to figure out how to interact – if the WMF is willing to provide services to the community rather than simply reserving the right to meddle. I don't know whether the WMF is willing to work collaboratively with the community, but the idea should be mentioned because it was originally the idea of the founder of the WMF (whether or not the WMF pays any attention to him any more). Robert McClenon (talk) 02:25, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

In response to: "I don't know whether the WMF is willing to work collaboratively with the community", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_to_the_Wikimedia_Foundation%27s_ban_of_Fram (tldr: they are not) They are also obviously unable to handle mediating in conflicts between users; they are unable to handle the conflicts they've created between them and the community. 02:48, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

My implied question had been whether the WMF was willing to be a constructive participant in dealing with conflict. The answer appears to be somewhat worse, which is that they not only are not willing to engage constructively, but just are signaling that they are being disruptive for the sake of using power. I think that the English Wikipedia has a deeply flawed governance process, and that the WMF could help to improve it, but the WMF is only making things worse. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:39, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Fram is a cause célèbre. Professional mediators actually exist as members of our community who have experience and interest in Wikipedia sufficient to understand cases. Would rather see organic hires then rare bird types with a long learning curve. -- GreenC 04:23, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

• I doubt very much that the WMF would change its MO and collaborate more closely with the community any time soon. I would like to see as many tasks as possible devolved to the communities, leaving only a barebones staff in SF to manage the servers and the software, legally required financial accounting, and legal counsel. This would also have the advantage of cutting down significantly on the huge bill for salaries and staff junkets, and leave more funds for the volunteers to attend meetings together to coordinate essential work. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:04, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

User:Kudpung - You have missed one of the points, or maybe you haven't. The staff junkets are one of the purposes of the staff.

• I don't think hiring professional mediators is the way to go here. We have experienced folk in the community that could likely take on such a role - though I understand the idea of holding an ArbCom style election to select these editors. It would also allow whatever the new body is possibly to have some teeth. Steven Crossin ^{Help resolve disputes!} 12:28, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
  • I've previously suggested having paid moderators (a somewhat broader role than mediation as previously implemented through the mediation committee) not because the community lacks appropriate persons to do this work, but to ensure there are people dedicated to do this work full-time, given the amount of effort required and the many disputes that could benefit. I would suggest their selection and regular re-evaluation be done by the community; the WMF's only involvement would be to provide the required funding and HR support. isaacl (talk) 13:56, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Non-Arbitrary Break

Firstly, whoever put this break in is a complete and utter nerd. I love it.Nosebagbear (talk)

User:Nosebagbear - I put the break there and labeled it for the following reasons. First, I put it there to put a bottom on my comments, so that it would be clear whether further comments were in response to mine or were something else. Second, the heading "Arbitrary Break" is sometimes used at the drama boards and elsewhere, and it usually is not only arbitrary but stupid. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:31, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: - I'd assumed it was "non-arbitrary" because we were talking about meditation, and thus, it wasn't arbitrary Nosebagbear (talk)

Well, if we were talking about meditation, I might have specified that I was discussing Christian and non-sectarian traditions as opposed to Buddhist or other South Asian and East Asian traditions. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:49, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

self-trout Nosebagbear (talk)

• I think professional mediators is so far out there as an option that it'd delay actually trying to handle the issue for a year or so. Nosebagbear (talk)
• I am inclined to think a reduced, but not completely informal, bureauracy is needed (e.g. most participants must agree but not all (in effect, enough to form a consensus), at least 1 other method of dispute resolution attempted, etc). As to whether binding mediation is wise...I still feel that is dangerous. I think we need to demonstrate that "conventional" mediation (in some form) could be made to work before attempting a major shift in decision-making. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:31, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

What Is Binding Mediation?

There are comments being made about binding mediation. Maybe I shouldn't even ask, since they usually are not favorable to it, and since it may be contrary to the concept of brainstorming to question the value of a suggestion, but I will ask: What is binding mediation? How does it work? Is it intended always to result in a binding decision, or is it only intended that, if agreement is reached, the agreement binds the parties for a period of time? Judicial mediation, e.g., in divorce, is binding, but does not always work as mediation. There is always the possibility that if the mediation fails, the case goes back to the judge, and the decision of the judge is binding, because it is a court of law with a real judge, and a purpose of courts of law is to impose binding settlemets. Judicial mediation is usually successful because the parties usually have the incentive to resolve the case before it goes back to the judge. Any mediation idea will probably fall into one of these categories: (1) non-binding, facilitate discussion, possibly leading to non-binding compromise, like DRN normally is; (2) "optionally binding", facilitate discussion, intended to result in a binding agreement; (3) judicial style, with a judge-like fallback behind the mediation. User:SmokeyJoe hasn't answered my question above about the big stick, but this is more or less a restatement of that question as to what the big stick is. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:31, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

I would suggest that any dispute resolution mechanism at least have the provision, discussed above, that failure to participate, or failure to participate constructively, should be held against a party if the dispute falls back to WP:ANI or Arbitration Enforcement. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:31, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

In order to avoid re-discussing a matter over and over, some kind of definitive decision needs to be made. My thought is we should have a process that produces a result that is subject to re-examination only if new information substantially changes a key aspect of the discussion. However, in recognition of a less-than-perfect world, there would still need to be a way to review the closure process for any problems, and probably a time expiry on the decision, to allow for changes in the community's culture or its understanding of the issues in question.

I wouldn't say a failure to participate in a binding dispute resolution mechanism should be directly held against a party (for example, I wouldn't want a default ruling to be made for the other side, as would happen in a court of law), but it means when the discussion is evaluated, all of the interpretation will be done by the other parties. The non-participant should not be allowed to appeal on the basis that their input was not taken into account. isaacl (talk) 18:44, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

• I have little experience of “binding resolution” in grievance resolution beyond a binding “resolution” being a non-mediation resolution that follows a process that follows a failure of mediation. I do not think “binding resolution” as part of a non public procedure is a good idea. Quiet room grievance resolution may result in parties declaring a commitment for future behaviours, but that is different. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:46, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

User:Isaacl says that "In order to avoid re-discussing a matter over and over, some kind of definitive decision needs to be made." How and by whom? The one mechanism that we have in Wikipedia for making a definitive decision at present is the RFC, where the decision is made by the community. Is Isaacl proposing that the mediator have the power to make a binding decision if the mediator does not bring the parties to agreement? Also, is Isaacl proposing that there be a mechanism by which editors can be required to enter into mediation? That is two related questions, whether there will be a rule to compel the parties to enter into mediation, and how and by whom the definitive (Isaacl's word) decision will be made. Maybe I am out of line in criticizing an idea in the brainstorming phase, but the mention of a definitive decision without details looks like a handwave. And if failure to participate in dispute resolution will not directly be held against a party, then we are at least two steps away from being definitive. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:11, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree with User:SmokeyJoe to the extent that I understand. If mediation is a private or quiet process, it can't be binding as such. If judicial mediation fails, the case goes back to the judge. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:11, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

That's right. However, for the sake of safety for the aggrieved party, the mediator has the big stick in the mediation room. If one of the parties is violent or abusive, or repeats or confesses to the unacceptable act with a clear intention of not genuinely seeking mediation and the mediator is now a sufficient witness, the mediator can then become the accuser, allowing the aggrieved party to go away in peace. This is what police can do in when called to a domestic disturbance, or called to a troublesome customer in a pub, but it is not the mediator's intention entering a mediation room. In the workplace, the mediator can recommend action to management, action including dismissal. On this wiki, the equivalent would be the ban hammer, with the banned user referred to ArbCom if they need to appeal. Barring these extreme situations, the intention is that the mediation room is calm and honest, and any outcomes are entered into voluntarily. The mediator is a witness to parties's promises. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:15, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it's true I have not proposed a specific implementation; as I mentioned, I'm still developing an idea and it's not ready yet. However, as we discussed above, perhaps it won't be suitable for what Steven had in mind. The current RFC process produces a decision until two editors decide to re-open the discussion again. Human nature being what it is, this will often suck more editors back into the conversation. This provides an incentive for editors to tendentiously discuss topics until everyone else is exhausted and gives in. I've suggested that anyone proposing a new content dispute resolution mechanism might consider this problem, but I appreciate that a proposer may not find value in the suggestion. I did not specifically have binding mediation in mind as a solution, so perhaps I shouldn't have responded in this section; my apologies for the digression. isaacl (talk) 04:50, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Topic bans can normally only be imposed by admins. I would wonder if this body of mediators is community elected, then this could work. The idea of having a consensus decision being binding for a period of time barring any change in information might also be a wise idea. I'd like mediation to continue to be public however. Steven Crossin ^{Help resolve disputes!} 06:39, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

OPPOSE electing mediators. OPPOSE public mediation. Elections produce politics. Instead I suggest that mediators should be volunteers approved by ArbCom. As a rule, mediators will be admins. The viewdeleted rights are important, as is experience with all the things expected of admins, including temperament, and a respected understanding of the purpose of the project. As a rule, mediators should hold the respect of ArbCom and resign if that respect is lost. It can be public that mediation is concurring, but the mediator must invite each party to freely explain their own perspectives on things, and in the first rounds, the parties are likely to say ill-founded, ill-considered, legally defamatory things. Mediation works, I have seen it routinely work well, and I have never seen it attempted openly in public and I think that is the continuing mistake of ANI - ArbCom in dispute resolution. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:57, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom appointment could work possibly, similar to how they appoint checkusers/oversighters? I wonder if that would be supported by the community, however. If not on-wiki, where could mediation take place? MedCom previously made all mediation privileged - that good faith discussions cannot be used in conduct proceedings, to allow for open discussion without unnecessary fear of retribution. I'm wondering if something like that could work. Steven Crossin ^{Help resolve disputes!} 08:03, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

• Mediator appointment by ArbCom hopefully would be for less formal than checkusers/oversighters, but yes, I can't see why that part wouldn't work. Where could mediation take place? That, I do not know, I actually have no experience with any mediation that is not face to face in a quiet room. I have seen nothing at Wikipedia that I call mediation, only public trials. Email, google docs, telephone, skype, these could all work for some, and not for others. Traditional mediation at a WP:Meetup could even work, should it happen that individuals can make the same one. An ad hoc meetup between a party, especially the complaining/aggrieved party and a mediator could work well. Possibly mediator A assigned to party A, and mediator B assigned to party B, each parties can meet their mediators, that could work. Mediators could be assigned by proximity. I think it is only the first meetings between party and mediator, where party vents and mediator validates moderates and advises, where it can be most important that there is no hard record. Mediator A and Mediator B would debrief to each other privately later, and use that to come to a joint approach. Mediators always debrief, they must to survive. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:26, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
• Two points, on different aspects of the above discussion. It's in the form of "if, and only if, we had Binding Mediation":

1. I might support binding mediation only in the sense of the result being binding for, say, 6 months (or a change of info), if a decision was agreed by a consensus of the parties. I am firmly against the other aspects of binding mediation above.
2. The reasoning for wanting admins only as mediators is not unreasonable, but I'm not sure limiting it to such is wise. Relatively few souls would actually be good at it (especially as admins are usually executive in their actions), I think a general pool of agreed editors, allocated by circumstance would work better "this discussion has no deletions/RevDels, so admin unneeded" etc. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:42, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

What Is a Definitive Decision?

User:Isaccl refers to the need for a definitive decision. Do they mean on content disputes? How and by whom? At present, in Wikipedia, the only mechanism for a definitive decision on content is the Request for Comments. There are perennial proposals for some sort of editorial board to resolve content disputes (and perennial proposals, by definition or nature, are ideas that are not likely to be adopted in the near future). How will definitive decisions be made? I have the uneasy feeling that the mention of definitive decision is sort of a handwave. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:51, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you are referring to me in the third person; do you want someone else to answer your questions other than me? Yes, as we already discussed, I'm referring to content disputes. Yes, as I said previously, I have not suggested any specific implementation yet. Rest assured I read your feelings on hand-waving the first time; it's not necessary to repeat them or to link the term again. I appreciate your uneasiness, and I apologize for causing it. I am happy with pursuing other paths of discussion. isaacl (talk) 00:12, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Enhanced Mediation

User:SmokeyJoe has described a concept for mediation that he appears to be referring to as mediation with a big stick in the back pocket, and that I will call enhanced mediation. I think that it is consistent with the statement by Theodore Roosevelt that a leader should speak softly but carry a big stick, and that SmokeyJoe has stressed that the mediator should speak softly. The first part of the big stick will be the recourse of the mediator, if mediation fails, to report that mediation failed due to one editor being uncooperative and to advise that sanctions be imposed. The second part of the big stick needs to be the willingness of the ArbCom, or of the community or of the administrators at Arbitration Enforcement, to act on the report of the mediator and impose sanctions. This corresponds to the recourse in judicial mediation to fall back to having the case decided by a judge.

My opening suggestions were that improvements to dispute resolution can involving a better triage of disputes and multiple tracks, a fast track corresponding to present DRN, and at least one slower track, for dispute resolution. SmokeyJoe's suggestion fits in with my view, in that enhanced mediation can be one of slower tracks. Disputes may go to enhanced mediation either by early determination that they require it, or if fast-track dispute resolution at DRN neither succeeds nor fails but is dragging on.

As SmokeyJoe has described it, enhanced mediation would take place either privately (e.g., by email) or quietly (on an out-of-the-way project page), but a failure of enhanced mediation would become public.

The community and/or ArbCom will need to buy in to enhanced mediation by providing procedures that empower the mediator by providing an incentive for the parties to resolve their dispute. A Sword of Damocles will be needed to hang over the parties. That means either that failed enhanced mediation will need a fast track to ArbCom, or that the arbitrators will need to be ready to accept failed mediation cases, or that the rules for Arbitration Enforcement will need to be apply to enhanced mediation. Arbitration Enforcement exists and is a reasonably effective draconian procedure for dealing with difficult editors, and will probably involve the least change to existing rules. (The ArbCom itself, at present, is far too hesitant to accept cases. Sending failed mediation cases to WP:ANI is too random.)

User:SmokeyJoe – Is this a reasonable description of your ideas?

Comments? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:26, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

• Thanks Robert. Quite reasonable. I think the big stick part is coming across as over-emphasized. The more important function of the mediator is to listen, validate feelings, and steer the parties towards a pragmatic approach on how to move forwards. The first meetings, between the mediator and one party, must be private for two reasons: (1) to encourage/allow the party to speak honestly; (2) to keep private things that are better not aired publicly, eg slander.

A failure of enhanced mediation does not mean that the details of early meeting is revealed. However, the fact that mediation was attempted, and no longer is continuing, may be a fact that can be discovered. Note that outcomes of mediation can include things like: (a) we all agree to draw a line, and to say no more; or (b) we all agree to reflect on what others have said, and to pull in our heads for a bit, and to come back in 12 months to see where are then. Success and failure of private mediation is not objectively defined, indeed, the insistence on concrete outcomes can be an intransigence perpetuating the whole problem.

When entering mediation, one should avoid pre-conceived constraints, such as acceptable outcomes or timelines. However, some of these can be necessary, such as how much time the mediator offers to spend. Mediation can be exhausting for the mediator. Parties can include kooks and self-obsessed drama queens.

A measure of success should be the reduction of disruption to the project. Mediation can never guarantee satisfaction for an aggrieved party.

Mediators need a code-of-conduct, for their own sanity, and for the ability to transfer matters between different mediators.

Private mediation for Wikipedia editors would need defined scope. I suggest that the following would always outside its scope: Resolution of content matters; ongoing criminal behaviour (eg threats of harassment). --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Does User:SmokeyJoe mean that content matters will always be discussed publicly? I think that I agree that content should be discussed openly. But then what matters are discussed privately? I am trying to understand what the scope of private mediation is. I understand judicial mediation, which has to do either with divorce or with civil disputes (landlord-tenant, home repair dispute), where private property, and sometimes children, are involved. What would be the sort of dispute that would be mediated privately in Wikipedia? What I see in Wikipedia are content disputes, purely disruptive editing, and content disputes that are complicated by disruptive or difficult editors. I don't really see what the private sphere is. I do understand that there are kooks and drama queens (or drama princes, since many of them are male, and many of them are misogynistic), but they are usually kooks or drama princes about content. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:05, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

When User:SmokeyJoe refers to threats of harassment, I think that I know what he means, but he means something that is not what is meant by harassment in Wikipedia, by threats of real-world violence, for instance. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:05, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

The scope of private mediation would include:

* Incivility, between person A and person B

* Allegations by person A of bad faith of person B

* Bullying, including threats of harassment, including threats of outing, or threats to wiki-follow to pester. Person A complains of being bullied by person B

* Things not directly impacting mainspace.

If the dispute involves content, meaning the dispute directly involves a disputed diff on a mainspace page, then it is content and not a private dispute.

Bullying threats can cross the blurry boundary of scope of private mediation. Kids in the playground can be heated following a clumsy sporting accident and threaten to kill. Not OK, but is it a credible realistic threat of criminal violence? Threats of real-world violence, if credible and ongoing, are a challenge for a mediator, and a mediator carries a burden of moral responsibility for every moment they don't report it.

None of this is a solution to a private complaint. Private complaints can be investigated for public evidence, but without public evidence, natural justice prevents punitive action. Private complaints can be used to advocate for education, policy changes, better safeguards, for example.

--SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:35, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

By the way, the mention by User:SmokeyJoe of natural justice is spot-on as to what is wrong with the Fram case, which is a public tar-and-feathering based on secret complaints. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:01, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Two Specific Examples as Questions

If anyone is proposing a new form of dispute resolution, I would like to ask them how they would handle:

Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Talk:Pallava_dynasty

and

Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Talk:2019_World_Rally_Championship

?

These are the sort of disputes that sometimes arise. Robert McClenon (talk) 11:48, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

• I propose that quiet private mediation be used for interpersonal disputes, including civility. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:19, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Talk:Pallava_dynasty involved content and sourcing questions. It belongs on the article talk page. would advise participants to focus on actual or proposed article edits, and sourcing, and to avoid personal pronouns such as "I". --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:19, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard/Archive_179#Talk:2019_World_Rally_Championship was a content / presentation style dispute. That's a mainspace content dispute. It should be resolved publicly, preferably on the article talk page. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:23, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

These two examples are not personally sensitive matters that should be resolved out of sight. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:23, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe - It appears, both based on your replies, and on everything else that you have said, that you are talking about a procedure for quiet mediation of disputes having a conduct aspect to them. If so, then the idea to be formulated is not about enhanced mediation of complex content disputes, which was the original suggestion, but about private mediation of disputes that currently cannot be handled at DRN precisely because they involve conduct, to take the discussion of conduct off-line, when the only options now are to ignore the conduct and hope that it will ignore itself, or deal with the conduct publicly first. If that is what you are saying, then we are talking about a separate track for private discussion of issues that are partly conduct. Is that correct? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:07, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, but let me put that more strongly. Quiet mediation is only for conduct/civility/interaction disputes that have no direct bearing on content, and do not stem directly from specific content. If content is involved, if a decision on content may be an outcome, including the topic ban of an editor from a topic, then it all belongs on the public record, and all interested in the content should be welcome to be involved.

I have looked at DRN, a number of times across many years, and I consider it flawed, I consider it to be conceptually flawed, because it mixes content and conduct matters, and then treats both incorrectly.> Content disputes should be discussed at the article talk page, by discussion, escalating to WP:3O, and WP:RFC. Conduct/civility/interaction disputes should be mediated quietly, away from large audiences. When it comes to mediation, content and conduct should be separated.

If conduct and content can’t be separated, then the likely ultimate outcome should be the banning of the editor who can’t separate their conduct from content issues. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:21, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe - I don't fully understand. You say that DRN is flawed because it mixes conduct and content and mishandles both. You don't say how. What would you do differently? You say that content should go through article talk page, 3O, and then RFC. DRN is an effort to go through article talk page, 3O, DRN, and then RFC. Sometimes 3O is not available if there are already three editors involved. Why shouldn't there be an intermediate step? And how are you saying DRN should handle conduct? What we do is to say that we are only addressing content, and are only addressing it publicly, and that is consistent with what you are saying. If you are saying that we need a method of dealing with conduct that is less explosive than the drama boards and isn't calling the T&S police in the dead of night, I agree. But what are you saying should be done differently about DRN? I agree that many of its litigants are flawed, and have conduct issues, but we have to try to see if they have a content issue. What are you saying? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:08, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe - Yes, I agree that some alternative to WP:ANI for conduct would be useful. Can you propose something a little more specific? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:08, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

Hi Robert. Like I’ve said before, I have some real world experience here, but no internet world experience in dispute resolution, but I think some fundamental of real would grievance resolution is worth starting with, until experience says otherwise. One is that issues of fact are separated from issues of interpersonal conflict. The analogy here is that mainspace content and editor conflict must be separated. If two editors are fighting about content, draw up a table and put the evidence in two or more columns. Highlight the conflicts between evidence (aka sources), with the personal and interpersonal stripped out. Where that is done, DRN works, and I would even say is easy, as easy as it is to solve any apparent sourced conflict.

The interpersonal conflicts, primarily incivility, must be separated from the facts of the conflict, from any facts of content, and discussed privately. How to do this, I am not sure, but certainly not by asking a party to explain themselves on a public wiki. I’ve had some ideas, such as email-based mediation, but with mediators requiring big sticks to be used should a party prove to not be genuinely interested. I think this means that mediators must be delegates either of ArbCom, or the WMF. They should be able to ban, as an ultimate last resort, even if they never do it. In the workplace, this is equivalent to recommending to management that the employee be dismissed, based on evidence provided by the mediator. In community services, it corresponds to recommending criminal prosecution, where evidence comes from the mediator not from the other party. In private mediation, distraught parties may be very unreliable. On Wikipedia, the laws are called the Terms of Service.

The two methods are very different, and can’t be mixed. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:16, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe - I still don't understand what you are saying is wrong with how DRN handles content disputes, or with the fact that it ignores conduct and tells the parties not to discuss conduct. Maybe you can explain what should be done differently. Maybe User:Steven Crossin, the Original Poster, can explain, or maybe you can explain to him. Robert McClenon (talk) 13:57, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Robert McClenon, actually, I'd like to take that back, what I am striking through above. On a more careful look at recent cases, DRN is making good progress, good efforts and good results, with content centred disputes. I does indeed focus on the sourced content and mainspace questions, and its awareness and responses to conduct issues is pretty balanced. I have mistakenly ventured down a line of thinking that a content dispute should be blind to conduct. On pure conduct disputes, I see that these are not attracted into the DRN. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:04, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, User:SmokeyJoe, for being reasonable and re-reviewing the situation. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:59, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

Idea Poll - independent CUOS Elections

Hi all, wanted to throw up a straw poll to see if there was any support for making checkuser and oversight a community-ran process instead of an arbcom ran one. The global policies allow for communities with a "preference for independent elections" to do so, provided that elections result in a consensus, have at least 70%–80% support, with at least 25–30 editors approving. This would mean that people on arbcom don't get this access on demand, but certainly could gain the access. Reason I think this is a good idea: it may lower the bar for the arbom election, allowing the election to focus on appointing volunteers that are best at dispute resolution (including possible non-administrators) without also requiring candidate meet the high bar for individual CU/OS access - and let the committee focus on being "judges" instead of "investigators". This would stop the "appointment" process for these functionaries, though would not stop arbcom ability to sanction or remove people's access. I only intend to poll this for a week to see if there is sufficient support to spend time on running a large RfC. The mechanics of such elections (ad-hoc vs scheduled, format, etc) would be in the RfC.

Idea Poll (CUOS Elections)

• In general support as I'm proposing this. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:19, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
• I'm not going to bold my comment because I think this proposal is off-target. Arbcom is the body tasked with dispute resolution where private matters are involved so I don't see any good reason why they should not meet the appropriately high bar for CU/OS access. Even if we take away their actual access to those tools, they will still be privy to private information in the normal course of their role. Changing the appointment process for functionaries to an election doesn't change that at all. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 15:40, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
  • @Ivanvector: to be clear, not suggesting that the committee wouldn't be allowed to be CU/OS's, or that everyone on the committee wouldn't have access to the results of CU/OS investigations, simply that everyone on the committee would not need to independently be an investigator. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:54, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
• I'd avoid bolding comments regardless, which this page is explicitly not for. --Izno (talk) 15:46, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Izno: thanks, I refactored my own note and the section headers to help support that. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:56, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  It's a straw ... oh. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 16:28, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

• Two comments here. One, the last time we had elections on CU and OS (Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/CheckUser and Oversight/February 2009 election, [[]] and Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/CheckUser and Oversight/August 2009 election, Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/CheckUser and Oversight/May 2010 election) too few candidates succeeded and thus the system was changed to the current one. Mind you, that was almost a decade ago and since Wikipedia and the methods for publicizing discussions have grown so I wouldn't consider this a problem. What is an actual problem is that Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy says it's ArbCom's job to appoint people to CU and OS and the amendment procedure for that policy is somewhat hard. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:02, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Jo-Jo Eumerus: indeed - this would not be a trivial RfC to move forward, so want to get a feeling if it would be worth the effort. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:06, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

• I think the kind of people who could be successful and productive checkusers might also be the kind of people who have stirred up some opposition during their time here. I would suggest that the acrimony from last year's comment period hasn't been proven out by the performance of those who did receive the permission this past year. Conceptually I agree with the idea that someone could be a good arb but not a good CUOS, but I don't think there's another body better positioned to administer it - again as I would suggest last year's process suggests the concerns presented by Jo-Jo would still happen. And if ArbCom is going to be administering it we'd have to pass a ban on them granting it to themselves otherwise you'd be putting the committee in a tough position. Further, I have gleaned, perhaps incorrectly, that occasionally CUOS information is necessary for Arbs to do their jobs. So even if we didn't make them CUOS per se we'd still need to ensure they could see that information. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:09, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  I don't think the Arbitrators issue is a problem. You could simply establish that one can be a CU/OS either through such a RfX process or by being an Arbitrator and requesting it ("and requesting it", since if memory serves not all Arbitrators requested access to CU/OS). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:14, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Jo-Jo Eumerus: I am specifically proposing making any CUOS people stand for a specific election (see more in my response to Barkeep49 below). — xaosflux ^Talk 16:18, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Barkeep49: thank you for the note, as far as granting, yes in this the election would become the only way to gain access - replacing the appointment process (nothing would prevent committee members from being elected though). The committee could certainly be privy to results of cu/os investigations - they just wouldn't automatically be the investigators as well. In most arbcom cases evidence is presented to the committee to weigh and make decisions on, the committee members don't go out looking for evidence themselves. Just like anything else, some evidence could be presented secretly. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:18, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  You sure that Arbcom members do not do their own investigations? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:23, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  For the most part they do not. They are able to, but (at least in my short time on the CU team) it seems Arbitrators appreciate separation of duties. My point above is that the sort of information that is passed over to Arbcom is necessarily more detailed than the "findings" we might report in an SPI, for example, which are limited by what we (CUs) would be allowed to reveal under the WMF's nondisclosure agreement (which the community does not control). That agreement stipulates that functionaries cannot release more detailed information except to other signatories of the agreement, meaning Arbitrators must also necessarily sign it to perform their function even if they're not the ones actually using the tools. Arbcom is also the body that receives and investigates reports of functionary abuse, and access to the logs of the use of those tools is also governed by that agreement. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 16:44, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

• (edit conflict)Initially, I thought this was about giving the community the powers to elect CU/OS (as many other projects do). The idea still seems mixed, but I'd oppose this as written.By being elected arbitrator, one already meet the criteria to see CU/OS logs and appoint who ever else needs access to that logs. It'll be ironic for arbitrators to not be able to access these logs. In fact, I think we should have arbitrator group that combines all these rights for our arbitrators. – Ammarpad (talk) 16:26, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  I'd have no opposition to granting arbcom access to checkuser-log and suppressionlog even if they don't have the ability to access checkuser or oversight "data". — xaosflux ^Talk 16:35, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  browsearchive and deletedhistory as well - to further support non-admin arbs. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:36, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  While I agree with these ideas, if memory serves developers may object towards adding "checkuser-log", "suppressionlog" and "checkuser" to nonstandard user groups; flagging Ajraddatz and Rschen7754 as they may be more familiar with any problems that such a change would cause. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:40, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Jo-Jo Eumerus: I specifically didn't add "checkuser" in to that mix. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:43, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  The contents of the checkuser log are as sensitive as the checkuser data itself. Maybe moreso since data rotates after 90 days but the logs are perpetual. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 16:46, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  What I mean by that is the log entries often read something like "<checkuser> got edits for <ip address>, reason: sock check for <account name>" which inherently reveals restricted private information (an account's IP address). The data expires but the notes in the log do not. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 16:49, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Ivanvector: that is private information, but it doesn't have the result - just who the checker suspected. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:09, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  You're right, but if you have access to the log of which IPs were checked for which accounts, and to the obviously public logs of which accounts are checkuser-blocked, you can easily discover the IP addresses of checkuser-blocked accounts, for the vast majority of reports. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:26, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  And similar could be said for OS, SDBAM would indicate that someone is a minor. As currently written the global policies would likely prevent this from happening. WMF Legal would have to sign off on whatever potential proposal came up. --Rschen7754 00:13, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Xaosflux: that is private information, but it doesn't have the result - just who the checker suspected. That's not true. If I were to check you with the reason Suspect socking, similar edits to editors edit warring at Foo and then immediately check an IP address or IP range with the same reason, it would be exceedingly obvious to anyone what your IP address is. If you use Comcast or Spectrum residential int he United States and don't move, it'd likely be the same IP address years later. The CU log can't confirm because it doesn't provide the other technical details, but the actual privacy stuff that people are concerned about is readily available for anyone with +checkuser to read without creating a log entry. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:33, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

• My gut feeling is that this makes sense. I'm not privy to arbcom's day-to-day workload, but I'm guessing there's no real reason for arbs to need CU or OS to do their daily work, and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of overlap in the skills required, other than handling confidential information appropriately. Arb is mostly about conflict resolution. CU is mostly about looking at system logs and interpreting the technical information contained therein. OS is mostly about making judgement calls on privacy questions. If arbcom needs the services of CU or OS, they know where to find them. Lumping them all together is kind of silly. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:28, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
• I'm conflicted about this. Three thoughts, somewhat contradictory: first, I personally like very much the notion of separation of powers. In an ideal universe, I think, crats, checkusers, and arbitrators would be three entirely non-overlapping sets of people (OS is different, because it's not an investigative power at all; it's simply to remove private information; as such, I don't really see a problem with tool overlap). Second, I think that as long as ARBCOM is tasked with dealing with private info, they're going to have to meet the same threshold of trust as CUOS, regardless of whether they hold the permissions or not. Third, and this is where it breaks down for me; I think the community as a whole is failing when it comes to electing people to positions of trust. We make it a hazing process, which does keep most bad people out, but which takes out a lot of good people also, and/or makes good people unwilling to put themselves forward. I'm referring here both to standards at RFA, and to the abuse that we subject administrators and (especially) arbitrators to. It's a rather paradoxical fact that our best arbitrator and admin candidates are often those who have skillfully negotiated areas ridden with conflict, but their having done so makes their candidacies attract a very unpleasant sort of opposition. Take a look at WP:CUOS2018, for instance; how many of us who were eventually selected would have received the tools in an RFA-type election? To sum up, I guess what I'm saying is this; in principle, I like the RFA-style system; in practice, I much prefer ARBCOM appointments, because the RFA system encourages blandly non-controversial candidates, and discourages those with actual experience with conflict. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:59, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
• (edit conflict) Leaving aside the role of Arbcom in all this and to what extent they would be more or less electable if CU/OS is unbundled from their permission set, I'm pretty neutral on whether functionaries should be appointed or elected. I'm leaning towards appointment because it's what we do now, and has the benefit of Arbcom being able to select candidates based on technical qualifications and their own criteria (last year they were specifically looking for functionaries who were regularly available to cover certain times of day, for example). But Arbcom could just as easily set that as a suggested framework for a community election. Someone mentioned the atypically acrimonious appointments from last year and the lack of any resulting drama: as far as I know the only functionary appointed in that round who is not currently a functionary is myself, and that was a resignation, not anything to do with conduct (as far as I'm aware anyway). I'm aware of functionary permissions having been abused in the past, but don't recall who or when except that it was dealt with quite silently. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:02, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  The main driver for my idea was that by splitting this element out, we could get more and better arb's as part of the "should Ivanvector be an arb" election wouldn't also need to be a "should he be a CUOS too" referendum. Perhaps that could be achieved by keeping the appointment process, but just not automatically making arbs CUOS's - if they want to become one they should use the existing framework of going through community consultation first? — xaosflux ^Talk 17:07, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Xaosflux, part of the issue for me is that I am pretty unconvinced that CUOS is driving ArbCom elections - the electorate is just too huge and it's my deep suspicion that the overwhelming number of voters don't understand CUOS in any meaningful way. Am I correct that you think in the last three elections (e.g. recently) that some number of people new to ArbCom would have been elected? Because that's not quite my impression though admittedly I'm looking at two of those elections purely as they're documented now rather than having "lived through them". Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:20, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

@Barkeep49: I think it might be dissuading some non-admins from even running in the first place, and the 'voter guides' had some recurring themes of not an admin. The resignation thread is what brought me here, and was thinking this is a barrier that is keeping volunteers away. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:31, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I do see what you're getting at, and I tend to agree but I think the proposed implementation is difficult - specifically I don't see how electing functionaries instead of appointing them accomplishes your goal. Arbs need to be able to see private data but not necessarily have access to the tools to collect it, so they need to be qualified to sign the nondisclosure agreement even if they're not also CU/OS (assuming they're unbundled). I suppose that's already a precondition in the arbcom election process though - candidates are made to state whether they have signed it or will sign it if they are elected and have not already. Do you think it would be an improvement to unbundle CU/OS even though they would still need to sign the NDA? Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:35, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

• One thing that's perhaps worth stating is why this is being proposed. From the delay of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Antisemitism in Poland, Opabinia regalis's comment on accepting Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 4 and the suspension of that case and the discussion here it seems like the Committee may be running into capacity issues; is that the reason why this proposal was made? (Note that I am already convinced; but it's worth saying so for other people). Incidentally, with respect to Vanamonde93's #3 concern perhaps we can say up front in the RfX process for CU and OS that people's arguments need to be on-point and that it's not a free for all - that RfA and RfB do not have such requirements does not imply that a RfX can't have one. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:42, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  Hi @Jo-Jo Eumerus:, yes my primary "why" is that by not including some of these technical toolkits that people can be picky about we may get more otherwise qualified and active arbs during the next election. WP:NAC goes a long way to helping admins, and I'd be welcoming of more candidates applying to the arbcom election this year who wouldn't also have to be judged for fitness as a functionary (or admin while we're at it). — xaosflux ^Talk 17:53, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  (edit conflict × again) That's a good point, we could state up front that off-topic comments or votes making up arbitrary irrelevant criteria will be clerked away. Dropping in on an RfOS and saying "oppose - hasn't written 9 featured articles" ought to be not just discouraged or expected to be disregarded, but actively removed. Or better yet, just make the elections more formal like the existing arbcom elections, with an election committee and secret ballot. Could even run mostly concurrently. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:58, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  Strict clerking would help, to be sure; but I think there's too many grudge-bearing contributors who know how to avoid being clerked out of the process. As another exhibit, I'd point you to Jbhunley's RFA, and the crat-chat that followed. I think there's three possible ways to get around that process; make the actual decision the purview of a small number of trusted users (this is what we're doing right now); make the electorate large enough that the grudges don't matter (difficult, because you can't make people vote); or limit the electorate in some way (even more difficult, because it runs contrary to a lot of our principles, and even the usual "who do we notify" discussions become very acrimonious. To make this workable, we could have CUOS elections at the same time as ARBCOM elections, and thereby ensure high participation; but then would it still have the effect that Xaosflux is looking for? Vanamonde (Talk) 18:09, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  Also, another thing, but CU and OS (especially OS) do not carry the same implication of authority that adminship has and most people never encounter the CU and OS processes, so I suspect there will be less problem behaviours in a RfCUOS than in RfA. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:16, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Jo-Jo Eumerus: Take a look at WP:CUOS2018...Vanamonde (Talk) 18:17, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

• As I see it, there are two interconnected but separable issues here. One is how to design the OS and CU selection process, and the other is whether someone on ArbCom must also be required to qualify as an OS and CU. It seems to me that the goal here is to get more qualified people onto ArbCom, to open the process up to more persons. That being the case, it is worth pursuing further the idea of allowing some Arbs to be non-functionaries. (If that were to become the case, then not all Arbs could participate in some of the private off-site responsibilities of the Committee.) But we do not need to change the selection process for functionaries in order to accomplish that. It seems to me that the current system of ArbCom running the selection of OS and CU is working, so if it isn't broke, we don't need to fix it. That would just mean that a subset of ArbCom would run that selection. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:51, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Tryptofish: perhaps just void the auto CUOS for arbcom, having them run through the normal community consultation/appointment process (obviously they would be recused from voting on themselves in the committee). — xaosflux ^Talk 19:07, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  Yes. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:14, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  Huh - to me it sounded like the point of this effort was to offload the CU/OS vetting process from Arbcom. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:20, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Jo-Jo Eumerus: my main idea point was to get things (like on-demand becoming an CUOS) out of the way of people becoming arbs. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:33, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

  I feel that I should add that I think, especially after reading the comment just below, that there are sufficiently many problems with having non-CUOS Arbs, that this idea probably won't really work. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:18, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

• I'd be fervently against not automatically giving Arbs CUOS access. Cases already take forever, while they'd obviously have first call on CU time, it just seems like something else that would put grit into the process. Someone who thinks an Arb might be problematic as a CU/OS should be asking those questions in the election. In terms of the 2nd question of should non-ARBs have an election for CU/OS rather than it being decided by ARBCOM. I'm just inclined to ask...why? We Wikipedians like saying "solution without a problem" and I feel it applies here. As a third possible RfC, we should amend it so that ARBs no longer automatically retain their CU/OS after leaving their position (and concluding their final case). Nosebagbear (talk) 19:43, 23 August 2019 (UTC)
• A few comments based on <sigh> long experience.

  Really, really think about how an election will happen and who can be candidates *before* proposing a change to the Arbcom policy. Pre-vetting of candidates is the genuine Arbcom contribution to the CU/OS election process, and I can speak from 5 years of arbcom experience in saying that there have been a lot of problem applicants, at least a few of whom might have been successfully elected. There's a lot of trolling value in opening the doors too wide, and it's possible that a genuine problem editor could pass the 70% threshold and get hold of these privacy-related tools. So really, really think about it. And then think about it some more. Once candidates have been selected, the community could pretty much run the election, setting voter rules and everything else, and arbcom would pretty well be certain to appoint successful candidates. But really think about how the community is going to control who gets to be a candidate - particularly if the "red flags" aren't publicly documented.

  SecurePoll is a bad idea for these roles. We've learned from the one CU/OS SecurePoll "election" and from Arbcom elections that it really lowers the level of support as compared to public voting. The fact that, even in much more liberal 2010 and with a lot of good candidates, only one candidate passed on the CU/OS SecurePoll election, suggests we'd be lucky to have anyone pass today. Note that most arbitrators aren't hitting 70% support in the last few arbcom elections. So...public voting or don't waste everyone's time.

  If Arbcom is taken out of the picture for appointing CU/OS, and they aren't going to be in a position to monitor their behaviour because they won't automatically be given access to the tools, who will be responsible for *removing CU/OS*? We already know that the numbers on the Audit statistics don't really show the whole picture - for example, there's no way to indicate the number of requests that an oversighter turns down, or which checkuser has focused on building up data on checkuserwiki - so even inactivity stats are a pretty shaky way to determine tool removal, especially for oversighters. Note that this isn't the role of the ombuds. Term limits are always an issue, because experience and knowledge of historical socks really is important for CUs especially (oversighters not so much). We get more malicious socks here than pretty much the rest of the projects combined.

  It's pretty likely that IP masking is going to come into effect at some point in the next few years. This will have a big effect on managing vandalism. While there are already efforts to work on tools so that administrators and perhaps other trusted users can look at range blocks and so on, it's pretty likely that this project's need for active, knowledgeable checkusers will increase. How is the community going to deal with that?

  In other words, if you're thinking of stripping the responsibility of CU/OS from arbcom, just creating elections isn't enough. You have to think about ALL aspects of CU/OS - screening candidates, addressing problems, oversight of the rights holders, removal of permissions, what to do when arbitrators *need* access to CU or OS information (it's the main reason why they have this permission nowadays), everything. We're the biggest project, and we do more suppressions than the rest of the projects combined. We do more checkusers, and block more socks, and deal with more problem users. This discussion doesn't seem to be about doing things better. It seems to be about reducing arbcom's workload. We have enough CU/OS to make it through to the end of this arbcom's term; they don't have to do anything about us right now. They've already lifted permissions from the inactive folks, the recent resignations have not had a significantly negative impact; most OS requests are managed within an hour of receipt, and SPIs requiring CU are handled in a reasonable time. There's a case to be made that CU/OS should be managed by the community; it was certainly the direction we were heading when I was on Arbcom back in the days of electing CU/OS, but those goals were derailed by the poor outcome of the SecurePoll election in 2010. But proposing a major change like this mainly to lighten arbcom's workload...that isn't the case. Risker (talk) 00:23, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Risker: thank you for the history! I think we are making good use of Idea Lab here - as I certainly didn't want to bring some half-baked RfC to the larger community. My primary motivation was to try to "lower the bar" to volunteers wanting to be on ArbCom that may otherwise be opposed because of our defacto "you get elected to arbcom - you get CU/OS access (basically for life)" situation. Do you have any thoughts in to the ideas of "all CU/OS's should go through the same process" (community input, followed by appointment). There have been some good arguments to get non-admins on arbcom, but with them jumping over RFA and going straight to CUOS it has (reasonable) opposition each term. As far as the lifetime appointment item - I would have brought up options for fixed terms/reconfirmations during an actual RfC. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:12, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Hi Xaosflux. I suspect most people in the community are currently unaware that both the checkuser and the oversight function are not dependent on having adminship; the tools are built in a way that a non-admin can use them, and we can thank Xeno for that initiative. In reality, it's a bit challenging to be a fully effective checkuser if you don't have blocking permissions, although it is possible, and some checkusers doing SPI (including myself) leave blocks to others already. We did have an AUSC member who was not an admin at the time of election/appointment, and the lack of adminship didn't impair his function, although he did go on to RFA not long after his appointment.

Something else to keep in mind is that about half of the former arbs who still have CU/OS were either arbs before our project really got into granting CU/OS bits to community members in 2009 (Jpgordon for CU and myself for both), or they were already CU/OS when they became arbs. In 2009-10, with the advent of revision-deletion, we made major changes to the goals of OS, so that the key factor is getting it done quickly (most are done within the hour now). I doubt there are many people reading this who remember that prior to 2009, the normal OS request turnaround time was about a month. (Yes, you read that right.) I also do not think that most people are aware that looking at suppressed materials, suppression logs, CU logs, and CU results is something that arbs have to do in order to do their jobs. The current confidentiality agreements that CU and OS have to sign off on would prevent us (including those who are current arbs) from sharing the information with non-CU/OS arbs; in fact, CU can't share with OS, and vice versa. Those tools are pretty much mandatory for them in the 2019 context. There have been entire cases where access to that data has been a key factor in Arbcom decisions, both those that are mostly known to the community (except for the material covered under the privacy policy) and those that are carried out entirely sub rosa. Example of the latter: person privately appeals a CU block to Arbcom (they can't do it onwiki), Arbcom does further checks and looks at the logs, may or may not find more socks, and decide to decline without a public statement.

Whether former arbs get to keep them for life is sort of a separate issue. As is pretty obvious from the list of current CU and OS, the majority of former arbitrators have neither tool, only a couple of us have had it for more than 5 years post arbcom and both of us are active in the tools and their related functions, and there's actually a "kill switch" built in so that if they don't meet activity requirements for a year post-arbcom, they lose them automatically.

As to non-admins on Arbcom, I'm pretty sure that the CU/OS issue isn't the determining factor in the lack of success there. Most users are probably wanting to see evidence of dealing with difficult situations that have resulted in blocks or sanctions, and non-admins generally don't have that kind of history. The non-admins who have run over many years have usually wound up near the bottom of the table, and I suspect it's more likely due to lack of what voters consider relevant experience, rather than that they'll skip RFA to get CU/OS. That should be particularly true in light of the fact that non-admins can already run for and be appointed as CU/OS. Is this helping? Risker (talk) 03:30, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

@Risker: yes, thanks - I'm getting a feeling this isn't going to be a way to get more quality volunteers in to arbcom, but that's why we have the idea lab :) — xaosflux ^Talk 04:00, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Quite agreed, Xaosflux - happy to provide some background information, and I'm quite happy that people are trying to come up with positive, community-based improvements in our "governance" model. It was bittersweet to look back on all those hopes we had back in 2009 when so many of us were brand-new arbitrators. We did manage to make a lot of positive changes (a decent Arbcom policy, much more structure for functionaries with significant improvement in service, and pushing the WMF really hard to accept responsibility for things that are now carried out by "emergency@wikimedia" and Trust & Safety), but I've always been a tiny bit disappointed we weren't successful with getting CU/OS further embedded into community responsibility, even if they couldn't do 100% of it. Bottom line, though...at least half of current CU/OS, including the most active members of both teams, are appointed out of the community. I admit I'm really worried that we're not seeing enough "fresh blood" on Arbcom, but that seems to be a lot more related to candidates coming forward than new candidates not succeeding, from what I can see. Risker (talk) 04:16, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you mean with 'fresh blood', Risker. Do you mean more, less experienced users, or users who have a good institutional memory but who do not run for Arbcom? The problem with Arbcom elections is that so few candidates are coming forward that there is a risk that all those with the qualifying %age will get a seat on the committee but might not really be sufficiently qualified for it. I am reminded of Vanamonde93's concerns above why editors of the right calibre are not coming forward - for the same reasons as RfA has become a rare occurrence. What we need back on Arbcom is you (or people with your knowledge)- but I would fully understand why you would not wish to com back for another 2-year stint.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:12, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

I think you're wrong on a few counts here, Kudpung. I don't think Arbcom as an entity is really benefitting from all its recycled members; in fact, I think it's the opposite. I think my participating as an arbitrator again would be a very bad sign, indicating that this project is running out of fresh ideas, and that we don't have anyone but us old retreads to do certain jobs. I think it's extremely concerning that there is only one current arb on his first term on the committee. And no, I don't think that the problem is lack of people of the right calibre; there are plenty of them out there. I want people with a lot less experience on arbcom. I want people who don't remember all the way back to the Ark. We need less knowledge and experience and more willingness to try new things and give new people a chance at things. It's a durable project, it can survive a lot of things. The bigger danger is that we become so afraid to take any chances that we allow things to fossilize...and I'm afraid that's happening to Arbcom now. I'm pretty sure nobody on the current committee really *wants* to do another term. I'm pretty sure most former arbs don't really want to do another turn (with the possible exception of a couple who really *were* problems). Those who do so are often doing it out of a sense of duty rather than interest or other motivating factor, and I'm not sure I'd trust a returning arb who said otherwise. No, we need new people to do things. I will take a moment to throw in a very rare boast: when I was first appointed to arbcom in 2009, the majority of the committee was assuming these roles of authority and responsibility for the first time. We changed the committee and we changed the WMF and we changed the project in the five years that followed. We need to do that again. Risker (talk) 14:42, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree with your analysis and would love some idea lab mooting on your question of "How do we attract and support a much wider range of community members to participate in dispute resolution, ones with different experiences and history". Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:26, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

• I think Risker brings up valid concerns. While I was on ArbCom, while I didn't every day use the checkuser and/or oversight tools, I certainly did need them in the course of arbitration-related activities (in some cases, no more or less than the simple ability to review a suppressed revision when a question was raised about it). Had I had to request someone else to do that and wait on it, that would've added to the workload, not subtracted from it. I would also add that if I did not trust someone enough to grant them access to the checkuser and oversight tools, I damn sure do not trust them enough to grant them access to the type of sensitive information ArbCom does with some frequency handle. If someone is not extremely trustworthy with sensitive information, they should not be on ArbCom, period. If they are, it's not a problem for them to have CU and/or OS. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 15:01, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

• Thanks Xaosflux and all those participating. This is not a "waste of time". The idea is to examine all areas to see "if" there can be improvements "somewhere" that will address issues ultimately improving the operations side of Wikipedia. I think a discussion without a timeline, until it plays out or a solution is determined, is important. Knee-jerk reactions seem to be an inherent human response and can foster ill will even when that clearly was not the intent. A better approach is to "brain storm" with calmness and collaboration as opposed to some "us against them" mentality. Look at the "down-side" of things and consider ---but can we make it work? Mistakes will always happen but then it is time to rectify things moving forward and not try to lay blame or alienate others.
• I think the community micro-managing the internal workings of ArbCom is not a great idea. Allow newer members to be elected so more work can be accomplished while having some restrictions and safety would be a great idea. This will not actually be "lowering the bar" of anything just ensuring we have necessary protections where it is critical. It would seem this may actually add an element of safety concerning new ArnCom members.

• Seraphimblade: On the thought of trust. The entire process from the start is that we can generally only go on what we "see", as evidenced by the history of certain editors. I have not examined this close enough but there is some merit of consideration, can this be figured out "if" it was implemented. The concern is the status-quo becomes the catch-22 as mentioned by Risker about needing "new people". If changes cannot be figured out we have a recurring situation similar to the lot of new US congressmen that was going to implement "sweeping change" in the US and found a brick wall at every turn because seniority held the purse strings. Here we have those we trust running again, and those that "might" do a great job or make a difference if they were to be allowed ---but not allowed because we "just don't know if we can trust them".
• Here is my problem: I don't personally know anyone on Wikipedia. We largely operate under anonymous user names and there is no mandate for a persons real-life persona to be attached that I know of. Some do but that is not a requirement so many times we can only go on what we know here in the Wikipedia world. "IF" there is a potential that the wrong person could be given access to sensitive information, and there is a remote possibility of misusing it, then how can we make a move to allow "new blood" with assurances this can be minimized? We have Stewards that have CU and/or OS permissions. They are also a first point of contact (liaison) between the WMF and the community. Surely there can be a way a new ArbCom member could request this from them, other members of ArbCom, or both in the capacity of ArbCom members, without further need for community involvement? If it is a "new" member then possibly the Stewards and current members of ArbCom vote on if a request for permission is warranted or needed.
• Nosebagbear The idea goes along with expanding ArbCom. I am in the US so please excuse the continued reference in that regard but a new member of Congress does not "automatically" gain access to sensitive military information. That falls under a specific committee with oversight. I would offer that any current ArbCom member, or former member that has held the position in good standing would automatically grandfather. That would be a discussion to be had but if you currently have it, or had it without issue, ---then it would seem to be insane to consider stripping it for no reason right? I am just looking at this from a "how can we make improvements", ensuring that protections are in place, while also allowing a way others can hope to run and stand any chance of succeeding. It will do no good to expand the number of ArbCom members if there is no way to fill the spots.
• The idea of "a panel (or committee) of three" to examine a case, with added "safe-guards" for appeals, does not seem a bad idea. I do not follow the complication. If there is not an available "Steward" or member with the permissions then some internal organization could mandate a temporary authorization to one of the panel. Some may not even want the permissions so why give it, or have it, if it is would never be used? That just seems too simple and if there are restrictions why this could not be implemented then change the "rules". We "trust" the Stewards and ArbCom members so why could we not trust that they will protect their own process within the guidelines the community provides.
• After seeing some really crappy responses from at least one ArbCom member I am certain there needs to be "one" chosen as a "voice" when responding to the community. We saw from the T&S communications debacle that some people may be fantastic, great assets, maybe doing a super fantastic job, but their communications skills may be severely lacking so they might not need to be selected (or choose) to try to communicate with others. I don't know the internal working of ArbCom but our projects usually have an administrator or "lead" so if that is not the case within ArbCom why would it not be a consideration.
• Panels or committees: Pick three members, that are available to handle a case, see if there is a member with the needed permissions, maybe one "veteran", and if one has to drop out --appoint a replacement and take a short break while the case is examined.
• The same panel idea could apply specifically to any ArbCom case involving civility like attacks, harassment, or Admin issues.
• A goal here would be more help, less caseload and stress, and not ever having to refuse an important case because of a case over-load. Also I would think, since this is not a US Supreme Court, remanding back down should be used when warranted but "if" say three or more Admins or community consensus deems it needed then ArbCom should possible re-examine a remanded case. None of this will matter if we cannot do something to allow more members to begin with.
• There does have to be some "rules" like total transparency on all things where it is possible and those needed for clarification, so I also think the suggestions of Nosebagbear at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#It's all about communication, even if off-wiki are worthy of consideration. Some of my ideas may be insane or already attempted but just continuing in a catch-22 will never arrive at a solution. If figured out correctly I could see where more caseloads could be handled, as well as a committee to examine our application of policies according to any WMF mandates, and report to the community what is not "private". Otr500 (talk) 08:56, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

• Thank you for raising that Otr500 - I do feel they have the benefit that they can be introduced regardless of how other discussions break down, would be nice to get a few more thoughts on their pros & (critically) cons. Particularly from an ARBCOM member or two Nosebagbear (talk) 11:41, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

• I agree generally with Risker, having talked with her about this in private before, but I do also want to add my own take: I am not actually at all concerned that the RfCU or RfOS would not elect qualified people. The much larger concern in my opinion is that the community would elect popular administrators who under no circumstances should be a functionary as functionaries. ArbCom does an exceedingly good job at controlling for this precisely because it can consider things privately and allow people to raise concerns that cannot be raised or they do not feel comfortable sharing in public.
  Without going into too many details, local communities electing individuals who should not be trusted with private data is a major issue on other projects and there are CUs serving on some projects that if they were active on en.wiki would be indefinitely blocked very quickly. We have even blocked elected CUs from other projects for socking on en.wiki (see Ciphers). In fact, the only recent example of a CU abusing their tools for political purposes was not one of the community appointed CUs, it was someone who gained CU through a democratic election to the Arbitration Committee, Alex Shih. This doesn't even get into the issues with zh.wiki, which was also a project that had elections, if I recall correctly.
  This is not to say projects with CU elections don't produce good CUs, many do. I have great cross-wiki relationships and have worked closely with CUs from projects where elections happen that I trust and think do an excellent job. It is saying that projects with appointed CUs have historically had significantly less issues than projects with CU elections. The issue here is not with not enough good candidates getting CU/OS, the issue is that Wikimedia communities have historically done a horrible job of screening abusive CU/OS via elections. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:11, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
• I think the only way this could work would be if we did it how it was in 2008-2010ish: ArbCom remains involved in vetting candidates before the vote, voting doesn't use SecurePoll, and ArbCom retains the right to remove rights. I will say that steward elections are entirely public and generally that works - but there is a lot of scrutiny there. --Rschen7754 01:03, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia reform

In a 2005 Signpost article there were calls for reform It stated "Along with the criticism of the committee, various proposals and reforms have been suggested since the ArbCom began operation." as well as at the end it stated "Throughout ArbCom's existence, there have been many calls for reform." (what-4 years by then), "to make the system more effective". A two tiered system had been presented and reference that there be "magistrates" or a lower court, if you will. It was suggested that the Wikipedia:Mediation Committee, Wikipedia:Association of Members' Advocates (AMA), and RFC be used more extensively. I have not compared the ArbCom structure of then versus now but a grand scheme of the community to [close down MC did happen]. It was little used, toothless (no real authority), redundant, covered content and not behavior issues, so was ineffective. It might have been more effectual as an arm or extension of ArbCom but that was not apparently part of the discussion at the time. Some history was presented here. The AMA is also no longer and I have seen adamant statements that mentoring "does not work". There were suggestions that ArbCom be worked like "Request for Admin" but also stated it would be a popularity contest. If something like that happened there would absolutely need to be a protection system in place on CU and/or OS permissions other than those concerns I would think we can fix something a "new member" screwed up with minimum risk. We can't in effect digress in 14 years, not explore all options, and just blame ArbCom for failing after assuring the WMF we can handle our own affairs. I think around 12,000 editors with 1,149 Admins might give enough representation but only 8 ArbCom members (18 bureaucrats and 36 Stewards) might be enough "if" they functioned "just" as a sort of Supreme Court. We can't change the mindset of editors without being able to handle situations as fast as possible to prevent harm to editors or Wikipedia. Otr500 (talk) 14:18, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Please don't for a minute, even as a passing thought, develop any plans that involve stewards. First off, they're solely responsible for checkuser/oversight on over 700 wikis, and also act as administrators on those that don't have admins. It's more than enough work for fewer than 40 volunteers, and it would be wrong for us to depend on them to do anything more than flipping the switches for the CU/OS rights; the Arbcom election committees have had enough of a challenge to get at least 3 volunteer stewards to handle SecurePoll for our Arbcom elections. They're also, as a group, quite vocal that their role is not dispute resolution in any way, shape or form. Again, given we're likely to see IP masking within the relatively near future, the global community is going to need more stewards just to carry out their assigned roles, and that precludes them taking on any new ones. For that matter, our own Bureaucrats have been pretty vocal over the years that their role is limited to assessing consensus for RFX, and approving bots; back before SUL, they did account renaming, but that was a very long time ago. They've actively avoided accepting any role in dispute resolution outside of their specific parameters, or even using their experience in assessing consensus to determine consensus in any other discussions but RFX.

Having said that, we've seen many 'crats take on additional roles as CU, OS, or arbitrator, and even a few enwiki-based stewards hold (or have held) CU or OS or both on this project. For that matter, as can be seen from the list of current arbitrators, many started off as CU or OS and took on the additional arb hat. Again, though...we're depending on the existing "leaders" to simply keep taking on more roles and responsibilities instead of actively developing and bringing forward new candidates. This is on all of us.

Arbcom is not now, nor has it ever been, a "supreme court". It is probably this misdirected mindset that makes the role so unattractive to many, and I urge everyone to stop talking that way. It just isn't. The more people have treated it as a judicial system, the less effective it has been. This is a website, it's not a nation-state. There is almost nothing that can happen on this website that is addressed by Arbcom or any of the functionary roles that is of any import to the world outside the website; sure, there'll be passing references in the media about a big socking ring or someone messing around on a politician's article, but it's ephemeral. We should drop our pretense of self-importance, and recognize that Arbcom's role is dealing with problem users in a way that promotes the continued success of the encyclopedia. Frankly, they don't even have to be right to be effective. Risker (talk) 20:13, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

It's true for the most part the enwiki 'Crat's are not interested in running any sort of dispute resolution processes. We do have a few other rare tasks, but they are indeed rare. If a community desysop/recall process ever takes off I'd expect our 'crat to be involved in that. Importantly, all of our 'crats are also admins, I spend a lot more time using my admin toolset then my 'crat one. I doubt there would be any strong support for using stewards here (the once a year ask of 3 of them to assist in the election process not withstanding) - probably just short of support for asking T&S to take over dispute resolution :D — xaosflux ^Talk 20:30, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world. When one searches Google or asks some knowledgebase a question, chances are the answer comes from Wikipedia. This has a real impact. If a cabal of Wikipedia editors label a major political party as fascist, and Arbcom decides this is perfectly legit, that party may very well lose some elections because of Wikipedia. That said, it's still mostly just wikidrama. Maybe a lot of people are turned off by the "supreme court" meme, but, personally, I suspect the workload, adjudicating boring content disputes, and the abuse hurled at Arbcom are the major reasons that people resist running. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 00:50, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

If it were "adjudicating boring content disputes" I think there'd be more people willing to step up, as there'd be a direct effect on improving Wikipedia articles. The problem is that it's managing interpersonal conduct issues, one of the hardest tasks any group has to deal with, without anything more than personal motivation to provide satisfaction. isaacl (talk) 01:30, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

When I say "content dispute", I guess what I mean is "long-running content dispute that is now framed in terms of conduct". Arbcom doesn't hear cases about content disputes, but it will hear your complaint about how User:Example and a team of meat puppets are POV-pushing in some contentious topic. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 02:54, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Drafting a partial blocks RfC

A few weeks ago, I started a discussion on MusikAnimal's talk page regarding partial blocks and whether the English Wikipedia had any interest in adopting this feature. As a result of the discussion, I created a draft RfC which is now at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Partial blocks. I wanted to push this here to get more input on the draft. Is the format too messy? For "Option B", the limited implementation, should we include more subcases to start? Should we allow users to add their own suggested subcases during the RfC? Mz7 (talk) 21:35, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

@Amorymeltzer: In response to your question re. enforcing vs. recording editing restrictions, I was mostly trying to put into word the proposal about recording restrictions that MusikAnimal had suggested – presumably part of the purpose would be to help enforce editing restrictions, with the caveat that the restriction might apply to pages not covered by the block. I've added the word "enforcing" to B.3 to clarify this. Mz7 (talk) 21:39, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

I would like to ping SPoore (WMF) to this discussion, since she has information about how other Wikipedia (e.g. Italian Wikipedia) have used partial blocks. Perhaps we might choose to follow the lead of other projects in deciding how to implement this. Mz7 (talk) 21:39, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Mz7, I'm working on getting metrics and use cases for partial blocks for the wikis that are using them now during the testing phase. SPoore (WMF), Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 20:00, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

What would the most common use cases for admins be if they had free-reign (Option C)? Tazerdadog (talk) 00:00, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

It seems to me that the way you've structured the RFC with respect to option B would get messy quick. I think as the RFC progresses people would add more use cases to B, and people who !vote early on may not come back to evaluate the later added options. It might be better to make it a two part RFC, and if option B (allow partial blocks in specific use cases) passes, then have a second RFC on what use cases people want. While discussion of the first part progresses, there should be a sub section for discussion (but not !voting) of possible use cases to be added to the second part. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 16:21, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

@ONUnicorn: Right, I had that thought as well. Your two-parter RfC idea did cross my mind, and I think I will change the draft to that format. Thanks! Mz7 (talk) 02:05, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't know if Sydney's got all the information together, but I hear that there are some cultural differences, partly based on how a community feels about blocking established editors/vested contributors. At some wikis, blocking a "regular", regardless of how bad the behavior is, brings down wrath on the admin, because now there will be a permanent badge of shame in the user's block log. Blocking anyone except newbies is seen at some wikis as an insult, rather than a technical means to interrupt some bad behavior. But since what they're calling "partial blocks" aren't regular blocks, and therefore aren't recorded in the regular Special:Log/block, some communities feel like this is a more appropriate way to deal with established editors – more like a technical way of saying "Hey, we like having you here overall, but you need to take a break from this particular page for a couple of days".

I don't know that we'd see the same dynamic in this community, but I think that team will have interesting things to say as they analyze what's been going on. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): I'm not sure I understand. The current guidance seems to indicate that these are recorded in the block log as normal. GMG^talk 11:00, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm sure that it's logged somewhere, but I can't find any specifically in Special:Log/block. The feature's under active development, so they may have tried different things at different times. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:18, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Not sure if this is off-topic or not, but is it technically possible to block a user from editing a page and all its subpages, or pages that contain a particular string in their names? For example, would it be possible to block a user from editing all subpages of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion? feminist (talk) 10:26, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

@Mz7: does this feature allow an admin to block a user from editing a particular set of pages (subpages, etc.)? feminist (talk) 10:03, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Feminist: As far as I am aware, partial blocks only prevent editing on specific pages – I don't think you can block the user from a set of subpages, but you can block access to namespaces (e.g. can't edit articles, but can edit talk pages). Adding the ability to block over subpages sounds like something we can suggest to the developers of the feature if it is something we're interested in. Mz7 (talk) 21:37, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

OK then. It seems like an important feature to me, e.g. if someone is problematic at AfD we should be able to block her from editing AfD discussions, while continuing to allow her to edit, say, RFPP. But what we have is better than nothing. feminist (talk) 05:21, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

• As a variant of B, can we have as an option preventing the use of them under WP:DS? As its not a current power, I don't feel we're revoking any authority that would otherwise require another ARBCOM amendment. I very strongly agree that B should be done in a distinct RfC - this is just a suggestion for "if and when B is selected" Nosebagbear (talk) 21:53, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
  • Maybe some day, but not yet. One of the ideas is to allow partial blocks to operate via categories. The use cases look something like:
    • Keep the editor out of 1 to 10 named pages (currently available) – good for routine disputes.
    • Keep the editor out of this namespace – imagine being able to block a paid editor from the mainspace entirely, or stopping someone from breaking templates.
    • Keep the editor out of a large group of pages – routine POV pushing across more than 10 pages or imposing discretionary sanctions.
  • The last one is the category idea. You could create hidden categories for each of the ArbCom discretionary sanctions areas, or a specific list for an individual, and block the user from anything in that category. You'd have to watch additions/removals from the cats closely, but there are tools to do that, and it might reduce the number of problems with accidental TBAN violations (e.g., if a subject is connected to the TBAN area, but the connection is not apparent to the editor). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:30, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
• @Mz7: - in your initial discussion you raised basing it off the ECP discussions board (which seems reasonable enough). Having read that, since it predates my active existence by 19 months, the closer mentioned an ECP review to take place 3 months after. Did that occur? And in either case, I would say a 3 month review to discuss how it was working would seem wise here, too. (I don't mean on the ACTRIAL/ACPERM level of requiring re-authorisation, just a mandated discussion of how it was working for en.wiki). Nosebagbear (talk) 14:13, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

  Nosebagbear, I'm not sure whether the specific ECP review that was mentioned in the closing statement was ever conducted, but there have been several discussions since then about the role of ECP if you scroll through the archives of WT:PP. We also had a follow-up RfC that proposed expanding the scope of ECP at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Extended confirmed protection policy 2. Going back to partial blocks, I would be unopposed to a review after 3 months to evaluate how it's going. Mz7 (talk) 20:34, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

• Comment - timed article t-bans work and serve the same cool-down purpose. Unfortunately, we now have admins using sole discretion to impose indefs and broadly construed t-bans. I'm not convinced that doing so best serves the project. When there is edit warring, and/or disruptive behavior on an article TP, all of the involved edit warriors/disruptors (be it 2 or 5+) should receive the same t-ban. Doing so further relieves the acting admin of having to choose sides or delve into content issues that spawned the disruption and eliminates any appearance of bias on behalf of the admin, perceived or otherwise. It will also encourage a more collegial environment. ^Atsme _Talk 📧 11:03, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
• Personally, I think we can experiment, and use the RFC to discuss best practices. By experimenting we can see where the tool would become useful in practice, and we can make changes and discussion and understand the logic behind the admin and the feedback from the target and other editors. I have been waiting a while for something like this (partly because historically I have caused problems that could have been stopped with a partial block, and partly because I see full blocks as an invitation to create sockpuppets that last for years such as User:Scibaby), and I think the RfC should have a few sections:

• no partial blocks, full blocks only
• partial blocks only by arbitration decision
• partial blocks only by either arbitration decision or community consensus
• partial blocks only when an editor has been edit warring (in addition to ArbCom and CBAN)
• partial blocks when an administrator has determined that a full block may cause more problems, such as sockpuppetry or WP:DONTBITE.

I would also have a section designed to formulate the partial block message which can be commented on by community consensus (relevant interface pages include MediaWiki:blocked-email-user and MediaWiki:blockedtext-partial). But I have been waiting for something like this because sometimes full blocks may not be super appropriate. If a user only causes disruption to Wikipedia processes, only block them from the Project: namespace. If a user makes bogus edit requests, only block them from talk pages. If a user cannot stop criticizing Donald Trump, only block them from Donald Trump and related pages. Full blocks prevent otherwise useful edits elsewhere from happening, and that is why I see this RFC as important.

I also have a question: when will this RFC open? Awesome Aasim 05:49, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Currently we are still waiting for SPoore (WMF) to send over her research on how this functionality is being used on other projects, but I recognize that it has been several months now since we started talking about this. I'm thinking we'll start the RfC "sometime this summer", maybe in July if SPoore hasn't gotten back to us by then. I'm also starting to dislike the current structure I have for the RfC (see Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Partial blocks). Maybe the RfC should be in two phases: phase 1 would be "yes" or "no" to "should we enable partial blocks?", and phase 2 would be "what restrictions, if any, should we place?". Mz7 (talk) 20:06, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

• @Mz7: - that all seems reasonable, both in terms of timing and split of RfC. July seems a good wait - partial blocks are currently getting an unfair blowback from the Fram saga, and it'd be nice to give them a fair hearing. Do we need extra discussion about the specific options for the "what restrictions" bit? Should that be now, or, if/when it's conceptually passed, we ask editors to suggest what they'd like to see? Nosebagbear (talk) 20:56, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Hello! I'm Niharika, the product manager on Partial blocks (working alongside Sydney). I reached out to our data analyst to see if there was some preliminary data about partial blocks usage that we can share. Partial blocks is enabled on 17 websites at the moment. Many of these have only recently received partial blocks, so we don't have data to share for them all. Here is a handy table showing number of partial blocks imposed per month on some wikis with the caveat that it only counts blocks made on registered users and not IP addresses. Partial blocks are requently made for IP addresses but due to technical limitations we are not able to record them here.

Italian wikipedia was among the first to receive partial blocks and thus shows most usage of the feature so far. It is worth noting that all of these sites are much smaller than English wikipedia, so don't focus too much on the number itself. We are going to be updating that data periodically as we get more stats. Our data analyst (Morten aka Nettrom) will be sharing more about these numbers in the Research showcase next week that I encourage you all to attend, if you are interested. Happy to respond to any concerns or questions you might have on this! -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

@Mz7: I want to give an update and check in with you. Over the month July, partial blocks was deployed to Finnish and German Wikipedia, and all language Wikisource, Wikivoyage, and Wiktioary. After the end of this month we have more data about usage from this group. Technical limitations do not let up pull data for ip addresses blocked. This unfortunate because my spot checking shows ip blocks to be a pretty common use. I'm happy to answer any questions. SPoore (WMF), Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 01:09, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

@SPoore (WMF) and NKohli (WMF): Thanks for checking in, and I apologize for the lengthy delay and inattention this has gotten. I'm thinking we should be ready to start the discussion about this soon, perhaps this weekend. The main thing I would like to prepare is a list of potential use cases (see Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Partial blocks#Possible use cases for a preliminary list I've started) that the community could discuss and contribute to. To that end, I'm mainly interested in what kinds of disruptive activity other wikis have utilized partial blocks for, if you have any data on that. For example, edit warring or vandalism. Thanks! Mz7 (talk) 22:05, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

@Mz7:, thanks for getting back to me. I'm glad to help move this forward at a pace that works here. There are a few thing that we can do to get users good information to make a decision. 1) add any other use cases (I think I can add one or two) 2) spell out better how editing restrictions would work with partial block with current features and share the list of possible enhancements. 3) invite some admins from other wikis to share their uses. I can do that today. SPoore (WMF), Strategist, Community health initiative (talk) 22:45, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Lessons learned and other feedback from the deployment on other language Wikipedias would be very helpful to provide additional context for the RfC. It might be desirable to wait for more usage on the German Wikipedia before any RfC goes forward. isaacl (talk) 04:49, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

That's fair. I think there's no rush, so I am also open to waiting a bit longer. Mz7 (talk) 10:54, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

• @Nosebagbear: I've reworked the RfC to be a yes-or-no question: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Partial blocks. I'm thinking we can decide the "what restrictions" bit a follow-up RfC. Wikipedians seem to like to keep policy discussions sweet and simple. Mz7 (talk) 22:11, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
• I'm very keen to replace our current way of handling edit warring with user level page protection, though I'm keen to call this page protection rather than blocking. I would like us to move to a situation where edit warring usually resulted in the relevant page(s) being protected against the edit warrers with blocks only used where the edit warrers took their dispute elsewhere or there was another reason for escalation. It has long seemed odd to me that we go through four levels of warnings before blocking vandals but we block edit warrers on the first offence, especially as edit warrers are almost invariably goodfaith editors and members of the community whereas vandals who reform are and always have been rare. ϢereSpielChequers 10:24, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

Six millionth article

As of now, there are currently 5,921,141 articles on Wikipedia.

Questions:

• What will the 6,000,000th article look like?
• Will we reach this milestone in late 2019 or early 2020?
• Will the 6,000,000th article reach FA or GA status, or appear at DYK?

We are getting closer to reaching six million articles. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:07, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Close, but this time I'm no longer expected to have predicted when. Wikipedia:Six-million_pool is the place to look for your second question. Specifically on Wikipedia_talk:Six-million_pool the odds are strong that user:Mercurywoodrose has the closest guess, though not until early 2020 ϢereSpielChequers 20:21, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Bots that update targets of wikilinks to moved articles?

In the sports world there are sometimes clubs that get dissolved due to bankruptcy, only to be re-formed under the same name. In this case there should be two separate articles, one for each club. I prefer that the article of the dissolved club be moved to another title (e.g. Club Name (activeyears)) and the article of the newly-formed club be placed under the original title. To avoid breaking links, all existing links to the original title must be changed to point to the disambiguation title. Are there any bots that can help out with this? I'm particularly concerned with IK Pantern. 37KZ (talk) 14:16, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

This is a WP:CONTEXTBOT and would be rejected at WP:BRFA. I am also unsure that your preferred method of dealing with change of name is the correct direction in the general case, but that's a problem for WP:Requested moves and WP:AT. --Izno (talk) 14:17, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Is it WP:CONTEXTBOT to modify link targets to bypass redirects? One way of going about this is to move the current article to the new title and then wait for a bot to update the target of all existing links to that article to bypass redirect before putting the new club in the original article name. 37KZ (talk) 14:29, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

I believe this would entail WP:COSMETICBOT which is controversial as well. So from my understanding bots cannot help out in my case. 37KZ (talk) 14:33, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

For what you want to do I think you might want to look into WP:AWB, or you can just post a request (not sure where, probably WP:VPT) to have someone do it for you on a case-by-case basis. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 15:22, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Idea: Before saving changes, Wikipedia software checks for basic fixes.

I sometimes run AWB and some basic errors I wind up fixing seem pretty minor and it seems that the Wikipedia software could check for these issues before saving the page. For example, smart quotes vs. straight quotes. If we prefer straight quotes <nowikii>' and "</nowiki> vs “ and ” (etc.) then why can't the software check for that before we save the page? This, plus thousands of other basic changes, like miscapitalised proper nouns, links to disambiguation pages, whatever makes sense. Seems like we could save a lot of contributor time. Maybe there is a simple module built into the default editing system that corrects superficial stuff like common typos or miscapitalisations, with a slightly beefier opt-in AWB back-end extension for power users? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 15:46, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

The main issue here is that: If the software should automatically replace A with B, what about the time when it's actually B that we want?. These sort of small things need human to judge what's appropriate in each context. – Ammarpad (talk) 06:47, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Easily addressed by having the software ask for clarification in ambiguous circumstances before saving. Also, we can use {{not a typo}} when we don't want a typo fixed, and when/if we need to use curly quotes for whatever reason, we can use/create templates similar to {{'}} to make clear our intention. There are already bots that do this sort of thing without human oversight, and AWB has a lot of the built-in, uncontroversial fixes already. One potential hiccup, is that if Editor A makes a change and I'm in the edit history scrutinising their change, I'd probably like to know which aspects were changed automatically by the software. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 15:15, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

User:Cyphoidbomb I love this idea. Proposed something similar here[3]

Initial draft by User:TheSandDoctor [4] Still needs some more work though.

Would want to build it modular in nature so that different people / communities can have different modules. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:02, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

This seems like something that would never make it into MediaWiki itself. Every replacement of the sort suggested here would be additional complexity in the software, meaning additional opportunity for unexpected edge cases and bugs. Of the suggested replacements, I note that straight versus curly quotes could be decided in the opposite direction by a different wiki; proper nouns, as well as common typos and miscapitalizations, can be incredibly context-sensitive; and links to disambiguation pages cannot be automatically fixed and so would have to prevent the save entirely for the normal wikitext editor (VE could launch a wizard of some sort to fix it up, for people using VE). Bots or AWB users fixing these things up has the advantage in making it clear in the edit history what someone actually wrote and what (semi-)automated changes were applied.

But if people want to make opt-in gadgets or user scripts to do things for them, feel free. Anomie⚔ 12:31, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Better citation needed system

I encounter many pages that include at least one {{citation needed}} tag. The problem is, these tags often remain on an article for a long time, in some case years, before someone replaces the tag with a citation, if that even happens at all. Not only that, but the longer the unreferenced information stays in an article, the more likely a proposed citation is actually an example of WP:CITOGEN. I propose a new system that will solve this problem and insure that all articles conform to WP:V.

1. First, we deprecate all forms of the citation needed tag other than the {{cns}} tag. This way, the software will know which specific information needs to be referenced.
2. Then, we create a special page that lists all articles that have this tag. This will give users the opportunity to add citations before step 3 occurs.
3. After one week (or some other period if time), a bot removes the information highlighted by the CNS tag.

This new system will ensure the prompt removal of unreferenced materiel, but will still allow users the opportunity to add references before the information is removed. What do you think? --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 16:45, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

This is a truly terrible idea, which will leave gaping gaps in many articles. These days, we have far too few editors who actually write text for this to work. A high proportion of tagged information is completely correct, but so many tags have been added in the past that people can't be bothered digging out refs. Surely we already have lots of categories like: Category:All articles needing additional references (373,006) of these, plus subcats? There are still 59 in Category:Articles needing additional references from June 2006. Johnbod (talk) 17:11, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

I believe it is unfair to compare the current use of the citation needed tag with effects from its proposed use. Obviously, if implemented, users would use it more sparingly. Additionally, I am not proposing that we replace all the citation needed tags already in articles. I just want to stop using it in the future for the very reason that you mentioned. There are 373,006 articles that need more references. Obviously tags aren't working. If we want to continue to insure articles conform to WP:V we need to start removing unreferenced material instead of just adding a "citation needed" and forgetting about it. This system removes the unreferenced info while still giving users the time to add citations. There would only be "gaping gaps" in articles if the new tag was used like the old one, with articles being saturated with citation needed tags. I simply don't believe we should ignore adding reliable sources simply because editors assume "A high proportion of tagged information is completely correct...". --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 17:58, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

This is using a hammer to squash a fly and would cause more harm than good, IMO. Any deletion of text from an article for being uncited is far better handled by a human than a robot.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 22:27, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

It’s worth pointing out that the bot would only delete information that has been tagged by a human. So, this isn’t really changing anything. As is, unreferenced material should be removed, it just isn’t because people don’t bother, which is a problem considering that WP:V is one the most important policies on Wikipedia. No policies are changing, I just want to create a new version of “citation needed” that actually works. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 01:31, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree. Unfortunately, it's not being handled by humans, as Johnbod himself said. As a result, Wikipedia is riddled with potentially inaccurate "information" and the validity of accurate information is undermined. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 23:01, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

And I'm OK with that as I think that the cure is worse than the problem.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 23:54, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

I've seen a fair number of erroneous cn tags left by editors who don't understand consolidating cites at the end of a paragraph or otherwise don't understand that the material already has a cite. So, again, no robot should be deleting text.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 01:41, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

If we avoided things because a new editor could make a mistake, we wouldn’t do anything. There are far worse things that new editors can do. Besides, if it does get out of hand, we can just prevent new editors from adding that template, the same way we stop them from indexing their userpage. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 02:13, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

• Overly aggressive solution. One really common issue is cn tags being placed when there are perfectly good general sources, as well as the issue that Sturmvogel noted. It also isn't a mistake that just new editors make. Also you want to deprecate all other cn tags, so that would make those editors you did prohibit completely unable to indicate missing citations. You'd need to demonstrate that major numbers of editors would sweep the board with these instances on them in order to either resolve, or even check the cn tags were placed legitimately, for this to not be an heavy overreaction. I don't think that's possible, so I'd be a firm oppose. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:09, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

• The proposal is a bad solution to a serious problem. Another idea would be to make it technically easier to add citations. It is much easier to add text or even intra-wiki links than citations, and this may contribute to the lack of citations. As an editor of scientific articles in an underdeveloped area, I often find it a better use of my time to add text than citations, hoping that someone else will clean up later. But that calculus could change if I could add a citation to a given arXiv preprint in a few clicks. Ideally, give an URL and have a bot detect which type of source it is (arXiv, DOI, journal, Google Book, etc) and generate the citation. In other words, consolidate and complete the existing tools into a single, easy to use tool. Furthermore, it could be made easier to reuse an existing citation (even from a different WP article). And citations could be made less intrusive in the text editor. Sylvain Ribault (talk) 19:54, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

​There is a Citation Bot that will allow you to use DOI numbers and will then expand out the citation correctly. — Will (talk) 15:47, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

​DOIs are not enough. Arxiv preprints don't have DOIs. Even when the preprint is eventually published in a journal, I would rather send readers to arXiv than to a paywall. (The journal version might officially be considered the reliable version of record or whatever, but in practice scholars often use the arXiv version.) Sylvain Ribault (talk) 07:19, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

​I would wholeheartedly support that proposal. Perhaps incorporate it into Twinkle? --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 13:56, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

​I was hoping for tools that could be used by any editor, even editors who are unregistered or not very technically adept, and without installing anything. Thanks for mentioning Wikipedia:Twinkle, which I did not know about, but this seems to be for relatively advanced editors. Sylvain Ribault (talk) 19:48, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

• The Soviets built a Dead Hand system that is still operational. If the system ceases to receive regular check-ins from its human minders it automatically launches a massive nuclear strike and no one can stop it. -- GreenC 21:08, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

If that's meant to be a metaphor for my proposal, it doesn't work. I want to reiterate that the bots would only remove text that was higlighted by a real human. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 21:40, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

A Dead Hand is targeted (configured) by real humans. Without human intervention after a set period of time it takes over and "deletes" automatically. -- GreenC 22:18, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

Which is exactly what my proposal does not do. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 01:04, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

OK I misunderstood then. I thought one targets text with the CNS template and if nothing is done after a set period of time (1 week) it is deleted. -- GreenC 01:13, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

• I would say that it would be nice to have a button at the top of the wikisource box that allowed us to use the ref auto-calculate feature that's in VE. Nosebagbear (talk) 21:32, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

I wouldn’t oppose that solution, but I doubt it will solve the problem. As is, it’s easy enough to create citations using the tools in the toolbar. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 01:07, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Puzzledvegetable, if you are interested in improving Wikipedia by adding inline citations, then you might want to see Wikipedia:WikiProject Reliability#Getting started. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:45, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Non-commercial images

This came up on Commons recently. Didn't go anywhere, but that's Commons and this ain't. Maybe it's come up here and I haven't found it. Seems that surely it has been discussed before. But why exactly is it that we allow local fair use images, but we don't allow local non-commercial images? I mean, if we're trying to divine "degrees of free", non-commercial images must surely be "more free" than fair use. I can understand why a project that didn't allow local fair use, also wouldn't allow non-commercial, but I'm not sure it's obvious why the English Wikipedia doesn't. GMG^talk 20:08, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

We (en.wiki) can use non-commercial, but that is required to be treated as non-free, as all free images must meet the definition given by WMF which is here: [5] and any license not meeting that (including non-commercial reuse) must be treated as non-free. --Masem (t) 20:11, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Well, yeah, but how we treat "non-free" is (as far as I understand it) a local decision wrt m:Resolution:Licensing policy. Couldn't we just amend our EDP to accommodate non-com? GMG^talk 20:20, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

To be more clear, I don't know that there is a hard barrier (as far as I understand it) to us creating a WP:NCCC (non-commercial content criteria) to compliment WP:NFCC, in cases where no completely free alternative exists, and yet a free non-commercial alternative does. GMG^talk 21:33, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

There would be no point, as per wmf:Resolution:Licensing policy I don't think we could change it to allow us to do anything with "non-commercial" images that we can't already do by treating them the same as any other non-free image. They'd still have to be labeled as being allowed by the EDP (#2), they still couldn't be used where a free version can reasonably be expected to be uploaded (#3), and only for limited purposes (also #3), would still have to have a rationale (#4), and so on. About all we might do would be to try to prefer "non-commercial" to other types of non-free files. For which, why bother?

Besides which, I very much doubt any such change would get consensus. Anomie⚔ 21:35, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

To be fair, the issue was raised because the Foundation's own working group were the ones who suggested a change. We could still look to drop 2, 3 and 9 (and possibly 8 in favor of 5) from NFCC. GMG^talk 21:44, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Someone who is freely licensing their work for non-commercial reuse only has explicitly reserved their right for commercial exploitation. I don't think English Wikipedia should treat this intent as being less restrictive with respect to safeguarding the copyright's holder ability to benefit from the work. isaacl (talk) 21:52, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

As long as the Foundation has a binary distinction of free v non-free, we really can't change that (they want all content to be redistributable and modifyable by any end user to be able to call it free) But we can say in guideline that we would definitely more prefer a CC-BY-NC over a straight up standard copyright, if there was a choice between two images. And if a CC-BY-NC was up at FFD and on the border of whether it was appropriate, if it has a good strictly educational factor, I'd probably have it kept.

I will note we do talk about "freer" images when it comes to images that may carry multiple copyright, such as photographs of 3D artwork. (The artist's and the creator's), but this ends up as a non-free image. --Masem (t) 22:20, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

I think a generic statement to favour works that are licensed for non-commercial reuse could be somewhat perverse, in some cases. We'd be rewarding a copyright holder who is making their content available for pure non-commercial use by violating their copyright. I'm sure there are many situations where the copyright holder won't mind, but I'm wary of making it a general guideline. isaacl (talk) 22:38, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

For all purposes, WP is a non-commercial use and WMF non-profit, so we cared little on redistribution, we could be using -NC content left and right. The problem is that the -NC restricts redistribution and reuse to a portion of users (commercial), so because the Foundation wants freely redistributable materail, we tag -NC as non-free. But the thing to keep in mind is that our disclaimers do warn reusers that they are responsible for reviewing any File: content they wish to include. So for educational redistributors, NC is great and helps, but still poses the same problems to commercial users. --Masem (t) 20:08, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

We'd be rewarding a copyright holder who is making their content available for pure non-commercial use by violating their copyright. I'm not sure I follow the meaning here. GMG^talk 14:44, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Say someone takes a photo of an event, who wishes to sell it or license it to businesses. The copyright holder wishes to contribute to the non-commercial community and has graciously allowed it to use its photo for non-commercial use only. Your proposal suggests that in return, English Wikipedia should not respect the commercial opportunities for the photo (NFC criterion #2) and not limit the resolution of the photo (NFC criterion #3). In the name of fair use, the English Wikipedia community will have chosen to violate the non-commercial use license, and given an onus to the copyright holder to pursue any commercial re-users of Wikipedia who have infringed copyright, without making the accommodations that are given to protect the commercial value of works that offer no non-commercial license at all. I do suspect that some copyright holders won't mind the tradeoff in exchange for the greater visibility their work will receive, but I'm wary of making this a blanket guideline. isaacl (talk) 17:48, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

We at WP would not have violated the NC license. We would have made it more visible for others to use in a way that would violate the license, but there's a distinction. Every time we use a fair use image, we are making it visible for violators. Since most use of WP is probably noncommercial, the current policy could be seen as interfering with the possibility for legitimate use. The onus in pursuing copyright is always with the owner, and in choosing to se a NC license in the first place, the owner will know perfectly well that there might be commercial uses that they may want to pursue. No major commercial publication would use a NC image--they watch out for liability. Our responsibility is to post a clear warning that the image is not under a free license. We would not be favoring works with a NC license. We would continue to favor works with a free license. We would only favor works with a NC license over those that were not licensed for reuse at all but which we ae using under the US fair use provisions. I think it would be appropriate for us to do so. Every step towards free licensing is good. We've been saying we can not liberalize our policy because the foundation would not let us, which has indeed been an absolutely valid argument. The question now is what would we best want to do if they did let us. I think this neeeds a general discussion. If it is rejected, and I think it is probable that it would be, it should be rejected with full awareness of the possibility DGG ( talk ) 14:53, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

Although I remain wary of making images more visible for unlicensed use, I agree upon further review of Wikipedia's licensing terms that only Wikipedia's text is covered. Since Wikipedia is not providing a licence for incorporated media, it does not violate the licence of works that are licensed only for non-commercial use. I still think that it would be more encouraging to rights holders to continue to respect the commercial value of their works. isaacl (talk) 18:03, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

There's also the slight possibility people who would otherwise take photos and license them under the CC license would release them under a non-commercial license instead. I know if I had the option to upload a photo under non-commercial or CC, I would pick the one more favourable to my rights unless I'm intentionally trying to help the project. SportingFlyer T·C 05:43, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Which Creative Commons licence are you thinking of? I imagine a lot of people licensing their works for non-commercial reuse are using Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. isaacl (talk) 05:58, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

• In Foundationspeak, "free knowledge" means limiting knowledge so people can sell the knowledge at a profit. – Levivich 04:50, 20 September 2019 (UTC)